If Camelot Fell
by Panache
Summary: Zeo:: Through all the dangers they faced, what kept them alive was each other, so they never thought it might be the one thing that could destroy them. Continuation of Conversations at 3 a.m.
1. Beltane

Disclaimer: Someone else's sandbox. I just play here because its fun.

IMPORTANT PLEASE READ: For any of you who are avid Conversations readers, who have not read Chapter 18 of that fic (Seeing Dawn), stop now, go read it, and then come back because this is a continuation.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, you can read this fic without reading its companion, Conversations at 3 am (though I'm told it might be worth your time). However, if you're stickler for characterization stop now and go read that or all of this will seem very out of character. If you can suspend reality you just need to know a few basic facts and only a few subtleties will be lost on you: Billy and Kat formed a friendship over repairing Zords. During the course of this friendship they fell in love, but not before Kat had started dating Tommy. It all came to head when Billy started aging and then left because he was afraid of destroying the team by stealing Kat away from Tommy (it sounds melodramatic but there was a Lancelot, Guinevere, King Arthur reference and somehow it worked). During the course of all this Tanya and Jason became aware of what was going on, but Tommy still does not know. Billy has finally come back thanks to Cestria putting her foot down, and after some basic rehashing of emotions, he and Kat are trying out this crazy thing called love. That's were we begin, on top of the Command Center. (Boy that's kind of depressing seeing eighteen chapters summed up like that).

- + - + - + - + - + -

"_We're going to be okay you know . . . as a team. We're too strong for this one thing to finish us."_

_Smiling down at her, Billy shifted a little, and bringing his arm to her waist, drew her close, brushing a kiss against her lips. "You have amazing faith."_

_Snuggling closer into his embrace Kat sighed, "I'm sitting on top of the Command Center, waiting for sunrise with the one person in the world I never thought I'd see again. Faith is easy."_

They were at peace. An uneasy peace, like a calm before the storm, but a kind of peace all the same. Certainty of their choice buoyed them against the knowledge of what lay ahead. They were so caught up in each other that neither one of them took notice of the solitary figure that smiled up at them before making its way up to the Command Center on the ground below.

- + - + - + - + - + -

The woman who stood in the middle of the Power Chamber surveying her surroundings was all in all a fairly ordinary looking individual. Dressed in jeans, work boots, and a rather drab grey long sleeve t-shirt, she could have been any soccer mom running a few errands before picking up the kids. Of average height, average weight, with decidedly non-descript features, and gray eyes, she wouldn't have even been the most interesting soccer mom at the park. In fact the pile of flyaway auburn curls that topped her head was really the only truly remarkable thing about her was.

Except of course for the fact that she stood in the middle of the Power Chamber.

"You know . . . I like it." She announced to no one in particular, "I mean it's a little drab compared to the old place, but over all very homey."

Suddenly the chamber flared to life, as though in response to her call.

"HOW DID YOU GET IN HERE?" Zordon demanded

"Walked actually." She murmured, seemingly unfazed by the sudden appearance of a giant head, and continued to look around with interest. "You really should train your people better. I don't think either one of the two love-birds up on the roof even knew I was here."

"YOU SHOULD NOT BE HERE."

Smiling, the woman turned to face the large booming voice. "I should not do a great many things, but we both know that that has rarely stopped me."

Zordon's eyes narrowed as something in her flippant manner struck a chord. "BELTANE"

In his voice the word was as much a curse as a name, a kind of pronouncement of her absolute, unredeemable despicableness.

"I'm touched you remembered." She muttered, moving over to one of the brightly lit control panels and frowning down at it with interest.

And then before a signal could be sent, before Zordon could even begin the first syllables of 'Rangers', the entire communications panel went dead.

"Ah, there, now we can talk in privacy."

"WE HAVE NOTHING TO DISCUSS."

"See this is why you never got invited to the good parties. No sense of polite small talk." The woman called Beltane was still walking idly around the room occasionally tapping a control here or there as though just to see what they would do.

"YOU COME HERE IN DISGUISE AND EXPECT A WARM WELCOME." If any of the Rangers had been there, they would have been surprised at the scorn that laced their mentor's normally neutral voice.

"Is that what's got you so uptight? I'm not dressed appropriately for threats and posturing?" Beltane shook her head in disappointment. "I guess I should have known. You and my brat of a sister always did stand on ceremony far too much. I bet all your kiddies have hand signals and capes."

A spark emitted from the panel next to her, singeing her palm.

Beltane laughed. It was a rich and full laugh, the kind Mrs. Claus might have. "Okay, no capes. But that . . . that was a neat trick. Let's see if you like mine."

Her movements were incongruous to her words. Sticking her hands in her pockets, she rocked back and forth on her heels as though waiting for something to happen that was completely outside herself. Then without another word, without a single gesture on her part, Alpha shut down, his head smashing into the communications panel she'd been letting him try to restore.

"Neat, huh? I picked it up off a technopath somewhere in the Tenkari system."

Zordon said nothing merely looked down at her in poorly disguised loathing.

Rolling her eyes, she sighed deeply. "Oh all right, since you've been so tolerant for posturing, I guess I can manage to dress for threats."

And suddenly she was no longer so unremarkable.

Far from unremarkable, Beltane was startling. From the mass of gleaming white hair to the moon pale skin, she shone in the darkened room. Her too-white shoulders offset by a net of obsidian veins that wound up her neck and into her hairline like some eerie choker, sparkling with power. Taking a moment to unnecessarily smooth out a fold in the heavy velvet gown she now wore, she finally looked up, fixing Zordon with pale colorless eyes, her thin lips curling in a small satisfied smile.

"Now let's get down to business."

"WHAT IS IT YOU WANT BELTANE?"

"Oh I'm a woman of simple tastes. My wants are not many. Wealth, love, _power_." As though to emphasize her last word, she tapped another button, clapping delightedly as the Zeo Crystal rose from its normal resting place. "Ooh very pretty."

"ONLY A TRUE RANGER CAN WIELD ITS POWER. ONE WHO IS PURE OF HEART AND THOUGHT, WHOSE INTENTIONS ARE HONORABLE. THAT DOES NOT DESCRIBE YOU."

"No it certainly doesn't. Aah well . . ." She started to lower the crystal, then as though thinking better of it, raised it again and walked over to survey it more closely. "Still . . . maybe it would be worth it just to prevent someone else from wielding it. After all, she who _has_ the most power wins."

This time the response was decidedly more forceful.

In a burst of crackling, multicolored energy, the Center exploded with brilliant light, coalescing above the crystal in tight ball. Before Beltane could make a move, the miniature nova shot forward. Hitting her squarely in the chest, its force threw her across the room like a rag doll.

"LEAVE BELTANE. NOW."

Pulling herself up, Beltane shook her head, the web of obsidian veins now pulsing and crackling with power, her rich voice turned harsh. "Tsk, tsk, Zordon dear, you escalated the battle . . ."

Stretching her hands out to the side, she flexed her fingers, and with a crack, a fissure of energy ripped through the chamber, bouncing from panel to panel, leaving every electronic item dead in its wake. Finally coming to rest in Beltane's right hand, it wound itself up her arm sinking into her skin twining with her veins. Casually, she raised her left arm, and sent a thin tendril of black energy to wrap itself around the Zeo Crystal. That last shred of light extinguished, the two pale beings faced each other in the darkness.

"YOU CANNOT STIFLE ITS POWER FOREVER."

"But I can do it for the moment. Which means there'll be no more toss the bitch."

"THE RANGERS WILL DESTROY YOU."

Beltane scoffed, "I don't know why they'd want to. I have no intention of destroying them."

"I FIND THAT HARD TO BELIEVE."

She smiled. "Oh come now, destroying the Power Rangers? What purpose would that serve? Six dead teenagers and a backwater planet that's more trouble to hold than its worth. And sooner or later some other old geezer of a do-gooder would recruit another crop of fresh dewy-eyed youngsters with dreams of glory. Please. Don't insult me by grouping me with those inept fools you've grown soft tussling with. I don't intend to announce my presence with a grand battle. There will be nothing on the view screen for your young guns to watch, if of course they can get it running again."

"DO YOU HAVE A POINT?"

"Your Rangers have something I want. I get it and I'll be on my merry little way. Don't suppose you'd like to give them a ring? Save us all the time?"

"THE RANGERS WILL NEVER SURRENDER ANYTHING TO YOU."

"Pity." Another crackle of power rippled along her skin. "Well, I didn't say I wouldn't destroy them if necessary, just that I didn't intend to."

"THE MACHINE EMPIRE WILL NOT TAKE KINDLY TO YOUR INTERFERENCE."

"The . . . Machine . . . Empire." Beltane repeated the name in a singsong voice, emphasizing each word with a tap on Alpha's frozen form. At her last tap the tiny robot, sprung to life again, spinning like a top, his arms outstretched so that they slammed into the controls, tearing great holes in the equipment. Sidestepping the whirling robot, she smiled. "I don't think that will be a problem."

She closed her hand into a fist, and Alpha dropped. "No. Not a problem at all. You on the other hand . . ."

"YOUR EVIL--"

Beltane cut him off. "I'm a thief. Not evil, simply pragmatic. Can't have you running off to warn the little dears."

Black fog began to creep up Zordon's tube, receding a little when a ripple of white light pulsed against it, driving it back.

"Now, now, don't . . . make . . . this . . . any . . . harder . . . than . . . it . . . has . . . to . . . be." She grunted with effort, punctuating each word with a great obsidian gash, so that they littered the surface of the tube like so many gaping wounds. Still the fog continued to rise, plunging the chamber into further darkness with every inch. As it reached the top, the cloud solidified becoming smooth and opaque.

Grinning, Beltane strolled over and rapped her knuckles against the surface. "Knock, knock, anybody home?"

Silence.

And she turned on her heel, once again the non-descript woman, not one of the Rangers would notice on the street. Throwing a last look over her shoulder, before walking out she laughed.

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

- + - + - + - + - + -

Kat's head shot up. "Did you feel that?"

Billy nodded soberly, as another tremor shook the Command Center. "Please tell me I've forgotten what an earthquake feels like."

"No, you haven't."

They were up before she even finished her sentence, both of them scrambling over to the trap door that led inside. Billy's fingers shook so badly as he tried to type in the entrance sequence that Kat had to take over.

She followed him down the ladder, arguing possibilities all the way, each becoming more fantastical than the last.

"It could just be a surge in the principle power conduits."

"Or Alpha trying to fix the navigation on Morgan."

They headed down the corridor at a run.

"When was the last time you checked the air circulation for fire hazards."

"When was the last time you checked the integrity on the main routers."

"It could just be Zordon flexing his muscles, trying out def--" The words died on Billy's tongue as he rounded the corner. "Oh My God."

"Wha-?" Kat drew up beside him and stared in shock. "Oh God." The Power Chamber was a wasteland, at least what little they could see of it. The room had been plunged into darkness, the only source of illumination was the Zeo Crystal, which seemed to be emerging from some kind of unnatural fog.

By this faint light, they could make out the great gaping holes in the control panels, Alpha's prone form, and . . .

"Billy." Kat whispered urgently, directing his attention to the center of the room where Zordon should have been, and instead loomed a great dark pillar of what looked like solid stone

"No." He was across the length of the Chamber in a few short strides, his fingers already reaching for the controls, trying combinations of commands by feel rather than sight.

With each failed attempt, his movements became more and more desperate. "No. No. No."

"Billy."

Her voice seemed to steady him, to allow him to think a little more clearly, and he began announcing all that was wrong. "Power's gone, completely gone and there's no reason why it should be. I might be able to get auxiliary up, but that's going to take awhile. The controls on the viewing globe are ripped to shreds, and so are all the defensive sensors for all the good they did us."

"What happened here?"

"I don't know, but . . ." He moved over to another panel, and after tapping a few buttons, sighed in resignation. "Kat go down to the Zord bay, if any one of them have power tap into its com system, and call everyone. Tell them they have to get here now."

She was already at the door when he called after her, "Tell Tommy and Jason they'll have to drive. We don't even have power to teleport."

Taking this final bit of information in stride, she continued running, only to slow when she heard him chasing her. Before she had a chance to ask what else, he spun her around by her shoulders and kissed her desperately.

"It might be a very long time before I can do that again." He whispered, upon releasing her.

"We can't . . ."

"Do you see what's back there? This isn't the time. I promise you we will find a time, but this isn't it."

She knew he was right, but she didn't want him to be. She was terrified, and she didn't want to relinquish the one thing that made her feel safe.

Nodding numbly, she stepped away. "I stored your tools in the Zord bay. I'll bring them up."

"Captain . . . whoever did this . . . they could have gotten the Zords, too."

She smiled at the worry he was trying not to show. "I'll be careful."

- + - + - + - + - + -

As I warned those of you who read Conversations. It's a new direction.

Comments and Criticisms appreciated as always.

Panache


	2. Trio

Disclaimer: Someone else's sandbox. I just play here because its fun.

Author's Note: Hey all, I had a very nice surprise last Sunday when I was emailed that someone (whoever that was I thank you) had nominated me for the Guardians of Earth Fanfiction Awards for best Romance Fic. I've got the details posted on my profile, but more than anything I'm hopeful that it will be a good source for fic recs. Also, I've got a Christmas Fic Exchange challenge there that I hope someone will take me up on. Any way on to what you all came for.

- + - + - + - + - + -

Tilting his head so that he could stare down his nose, Adam gazed at the mass of dark curls that spilled across his chest like silk, obscuring the face of his sleeping girlfriend. Carefully, so as to not to disturb her, he lowered one of his hands from behind his head to caress the curve of her back. In the darkened room, he could only make out her silhouette, those amazing feminine curves that despite having appeared countless times in body-hugging, yellow armor lost something in the translation. He couldn't see the rich chocolate color of her skin now. Now it was just shadows, but earlier . . . earlier it had glistened.

It hadn't really been his first choice for how to begin advancing their relationship to a more intimate level. Not that he'd thought a lot about it.

Okay he had thought about it . . . continuously, but his thoughts had always involved expensive dinners, candlelight, and roses, not sitting around in sweatshirts, arguing over colleges, while Tanya occasionally flicked a Cheeto at his head. But because he seemed to have lost all control over . . . well, everything, it was Cheetos and not roses that were currently strewn around his room.

Cheetos weren't such bad things either. After all the last one she'd thrown had led to a tickling war, which had led to him on top of her pressing into all the right places, which had led to significantly different things being done with their hands, which had led to this very interesting discovery.

Tanya Sloan snored, loudly.

And for all the wonderful new things he had learned about her in the past few hours, he found this to be the most precious.

It was silly really, the kind of thing Kat could probably tell him, but even so there was a kind of simple joy in discovering it for himself, feeling the rumble against his chest. Lying here, he could imagine complaining about it for years to come, joking about it with her when she was teasing him about his weird quirks. He wasn't actually sure he had any weird quirks, but it might be worth it to consider developing some.

The mechanical ring of very unwelcome musical notes interrupted his contemplation of whether obsessive compulsive straightening or ensuring that he brushed his teeth for exactly three minutes every morning would get a bigger rise out of her.

_Of all the damned nights . . ._ He caught sight of the clock, _Of all the damned mornings . . . _Lifting the communicator to his lips, he grumbled, "Call me again when the world has actually ended."

"Adam?" Kat's puzzled voice echoed through the communicator.

He was about to ask her who she thought it would be when he realized that _his_ communicator was still wrapped around his wrist. _Oh hell_.

"Why is Kat here?" Tanya murmured sleepily, half lifting her head to peer at him through a curtain of hair.

Silently wondering how this woman managed to turn his life into a comedy of errors, he thrust the communicator towards her, just as Kat's desperate voice broke through, piercing the haze of pleasant confusion that had settled over the pair.

"God dammit will someone just answer me!"

Tanya grabbed the communicator out of Adam's hand, now bolt upright and fully awake, "We're here, Kat."

"Come to the Power Chamber."

"What's wrong?"

"Everything. Listen, just get up, grab some flashlights, batteries, tools, and food."

"Flashli-? Wait, Kat, what's happened?"

"It's Zordon."

Adam was already up off the bed, pulling on his jeans, oblivious to the crushed Cheeto that had ground itself into one leg. A sickening empty feeling had taken over the area where his stomach should be. This just felt bad. Still Kat's voice continued to stream from the little metal box confirming how truly bad it really was.

"He's gone." Her voice broke a little, but she somehow managed to regain control, "he's gone and everything's a wreck, it's just . . . just _get_ here."

Now fully dressed, the Green Ranger laid his girlfriend's clothes on the bed, and gently extricated the communicator from her frozen hand.

"We'll be ready shortly. Do you want us to signal you when we're ready to teleport?"

"No. No, we don't have the capability to teleport anything. Tommy or Jason will pick you up." There was a pause. "Where are you guys?"

"My house." Even as he gave the response, a little part of him wondered bitterly whether he would ever be able to have a private milestone in his relationship. _I should just take out a billboard. Attention Rangers today I got to third base._

Lifting the communicator again, he asked, "Mondo?"

"I don't think so. This just feels different, but we're still trying to get a handle on things." Her voice had calmed into a kind of deadened monotone, and Adam realized she must have answered these questions too many times already.

At Kat's words, Tanya had stilled in the middle of tugging on her sweatshirt. Then pulling it over her head, she did something that frankly went down in Adam's book as very strange, even for Tanya.

Reaching across the bed, she grabbed the communicator, and turning her back on Adam, asked, in a way that sounded like she already knew answer, "Kat . . . you're not alone, are you?"

He couldn't make out the answer, but when Tanya turned back her mouth was set in a grim line, her face pulled even tighter with worry.

"Is Kat okay?"

"Wha-?" Coming out of whatever reverie she'd gone into just now, Tanya looked up, her face twisting into an awful, forced smile, "No, she's fine, just . . . fine."

"Then what was that all about?"

"Nothing, it was nothing."

"Tan."

"We've got other things to worry about, Adam. Where do you keep your flashlights?"

And with that the conversation was over unless he wanted it to devolve into a horrible, unproductive shouting match.

There were times when Tanya Sloan annoyed the hell out of him.

- + - + - + - + - + -

"Shields?"

"Shot."

"Communications?"

"With a day's work they'll be limited at best."

"Sensors?"

Billy shook his head, "Nothing that's going to do us any good."

Adam wanted to throw up his hands and scream. _Everything's fried, can't you see that!_ But of course they couldn't see that. Tommy needed to know specifics, needed to inventory exactly what they had and what they didn't so that he could muster their resources and stretch them as far as possible.

So he, Billy, and Jason stood there going down each element of the Power Chamber's defensive and offensive systems with a fine tooth comb. Discussing it with no more passion than one might talk about putting in new plumbing.

Adam envied them their apparent detachment. For his part he felt very undetached. Upon arriving at the Power Chamber, his stomach had finally returned only to decide it really wanted to be emptier, and he had to fight the urge to run and throw up in a corner. Kat hadn't been lying when she said that everything was a wreck. If anything, she'd really been kind. In the eerie, scattered light cast by the flashlights they had set up around the perimeter of the chamber, he could make out too many details—horrible scorch marks that riddled the metal surfaces like scars, the twisted unruly shapes where the control panels looked like they had been torn into by some wild animal, and above all the horrible black shape that everyone was pointedly ignoring.

It was the elephant in the room, this great mocking monstrosity of shimmering obsidian. Looking at it was a little like staring into the abyss. Except the abyss didn't look back. Despite its gleaming surface it gave no reflection, you simply stared at dark emptiness where all your light should be. Maybe that was why everyone had turned their back on it, it was too painful.

Part of him wanted to rage that they should be doing something, that Billy should be trying to come up with a brilliant plan to find Zordon, or Jason and Rocky should be trying to chip away at its surface, but he knew instinctively that it was futile, at least for now. They didn't even have enough power to see what they were doing up here, let alone actually do anything.

"So what _do_ we have?" Jason asked.

Billy surveyed the chamber with what might have been one his characteristic wry smiles, but came out more as a grimace. "Not much. I don't even know what's caused the power drain, so I can't fix that yet, just try to get auxiliary online. As I said with a day or two of work, we can have rudimentary communications. The infirmary doesn't appear to have taken any damage, so once we get power up, we should be okay there. The Zords . . ."

The ex-Ranger trailed off, an odd expression on his face.

"How bad?" Tommy ventured, and Adam felt the air go out of the room as everyone inhaled in preparation for the worst.

"No, that's just the thing . . . th-they're fine, at least based on Kat's visual check. She should be finishing a preliminary diagnostic scan soon, but they run off their own power base, so they weren't even shut down. It looks like they were completely ignored . . ."

"That's odd . . ." Tommy murmured, a significant look passing between the three veterans who had by unspoken agreement assumed a form of joint command. Adam felt the overwhelming urge to chuck something at them. _Hello! Three other, very capable, Rangers standing right here! Let us in on the joke or the dire prospect or whatever . . ._

"Hey!" Rocky actually beat him to it, and it was only Jason's very fast reflexes that kept him from being taken out by a bag of Lay's. The trio looked up in shock.

"I'm sorry if I don't _get _it, but maybe somebody could bother to explain to the rest of us who didn't go Super-Ranger camp what the _hell_ is going on."

"Rocky . . ." Tanya placed a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged her off.

"No, Tan. Look, I am standing here looking around at my worst nightmare, so maybe someone could just take a minute and tell me why, with Zordon gone and everything beyond fucked, the fact that the Zords weren't touched isn't the best damn news we've gotten."

Exchanging another extremely annoying look with Billy and Jason, during which they seemed to come to some kind of agreement as to who would speak, Tommy took a step forward, "Because we don't know why they weren't touched."

Billy picked up the thread. "There's absolutely nothing that should have impeded someone who was capable of doing this kind of damage from extending the destruction to the Zords if they so wished."

"So the question is why didn't they? And there's really just two possibilities." Jason ticked them off on his fingers. "One. They overlooked the Zords."

"Highly unlikely."

"Or two. They didn't care. They don't see the Zords as a threat."

"And that's just-"

"Scary." Rocky completed for Tommy, mulling this over for a minute the Blue Ranger looked up, his face now set in a kind of grim understanding. "This isn't the Machine Empire is it?"

He had his answer in the silence.

For his part Adam had to stifle a panicky laugh. This was all too surreal! Like being in some kind of weird dreamscape where people threw chips and Billy, Tommy, and Jason were like the fates passing their singular eye between them except here it was the mantle of authority. That was really the strangest and scariest thing about all of this—Billy. Not that he was here because that was actually probably the only piece of good news they'd had, but the way he was here—just standing there in the middle of the Power Chamber when they got there, solid and permanent as ever, like he had never left.

And they had all accepted it, without question. That had really been the moment when it had hit. No pleasantries passed between them, no one questioned their good fortune to have him there. There was no time for that. No energy to spare. So he just slipped into the team once again.

But not into his customary place. Billy had a different quality about him now, a kind of resigned confidence, like because he had left, because he had found he could leave and knew he could do so once again, he didn't cling to this place, didn't seem to become its human embodiment the way he once had. It frankly made Adam more than a little uncomfortable.

He felt Tanya's touch and looked down to where she was twining her hand in with his, admiring the stark contrast of their skin.

"Hey," she whispered.

Lifting their intertwined hands he brushed a kiss against the back of hers. "Hey."

And then because he suddenly needed to be closer to her, he pulled her tight against him, wrapping his arms around her and burying his face in her hair, glad that the others were once again occupied with their depressing inventory.

"This isn't exactly how I imagined this morning." She whispered against his chest.

"How did you imagine it?"

"Differently," She laughed softly, "There were pancakes."

"When this is over, I'll make you pancakes."

Lifting her head a little, she looked up at him. "Promise?"

He stroked her face, all too aware that she was asking him to make promises he couldn't keep. "Yeah, I promise."

At that moment there was a scrape that echoed through the too silent chamber, as the doors leading up from the Zord bay were forced open with a shudder, fighting the entrant every step of the way.

Tanya tensed and turned her head to look at her best friend. Following his girlfriend's gaze, Adam watched as Kat entered the room. It was the first time he had seen her all night, as she had apparently called everyone from the Zord bay, and stayed down there to complete the scans Billy had talked about. That was another weird thing about this day. It was very obvious that Kat had some kind of authority regarding the Zords, and it didn't seem to come as a surprise to anyone except apparently him . . . and maybe Rocky. But Tommy and Jason had just nodded in unquestioning acceptance when Billy had informed them what she was doing as though they hadn't expected her to be anywhere else.

Now she stood silhouetted in the doorway looking like she had every right to command that authority. There was a tool belt slung around her waist and she held another in her grease stained hand. It must have been hot down there because she had stripped down to a pale pink tank top which was soaked with sweat, and only served to highlight her surprisingly defined arms.

The room had paused at her entrance, every eye fixed on her. For her part, Kat seemed to be very focused on the trio in the center of them room. _Well I'd be looking at Tanya if it were me._ But there was something grim and intense about her eyes like she was taking no comfort.

Then Tommy moved towards her, breaking the tense spell her presence had cast over the room. Gathering her into his arms, the Red Ranger pressed a kiss to her forehead, murmuring something soft that Adam couldn't make out, but Kat barely responded, like she was just going through the motions.

Adam leaned down to ask his girlfriend whether she thought Kat was okay, but Tanya wasn't looking at them. Instead her gaze was focused across the room, watching Billy with a frown on her face. Following her gaze, Adam narrowed his eyes in puzzlement. Their newly returned friend had turned his back on the reunion, his mouth set in a grim line. Instead his concentration seemed to be newly focused on the shields he had so eloquently told them were shot.

"You're hurt!"

At Tommy's words, Billy's head whipped around, terror lining his entire body.

"I'm fine." Kat gently but forcibly removed her boyfriend's hands from her face, but not before everyone got a good look at the long, thin cut that ran down her left cheek.

"Are you sure?" Billy asked, his voice thin with worry and something Adam didn't understand.

"Yeah," Her eyes locked on his. "I just tried to unthread a probe from the system too quickly, the wire whipped back on me."

She tested the cut gingerly with her fingertips emitting a little hiss pain as they encountered a tender spot. At the sound Billy took two quick steps forward, and then stopped short, his whole body jerking back like someone had just slapped him.

"You should probably get something on that." He turned, "Tommy, why don't you take her down to the infirmary and--"

"I said I'm _fine_." Kat growled, stepping just out of Tommy's reach.

For a second the two were facing off like dogs over the same bone, and then all the fight left Billy.

"Fine." He sighed, "Let it get infected, try to lose vision in your left eye. What do I care?"

Except he sounded like he cared very deeply.

"I brought your tools." She extended the other tool belt she'd been holding out to him.

Billy paused his eyes flicking to the tool belt and then back to Kat's. The pause lasted just a split second too long.

And in that second everything crashed down on Adam. In a blinding flash, a hundred different things came together—Tanya's odd question when Kat had called, Billy's presence here, why Kat had been here at five in the morning. He remembered them together in the mall; remembered Kat's desperate over-protectiveness the night of Billy's collapsed; remembered seeing her when he'd gone to the bathroom during the movie night, standing in the kitchen doorway pleading softly with someone. It all came together in this weird moment that seemed to stretch out in a horrible endless infinity, and he didn't like the picture at all.

_Oh god._

And in the next moment he realized he wasn't the only who had seen.

- + - + - + - + - + -

Thanks for reading. Comments and Criticism are welcome as always.

Also, I feel it necessary to warn you all that I'm about to enter lawschool finals. Consequently I probably won't be able to keep up the rather regular pace I've set for myself these few weeks. However, I promise you that I will keep writing.

Panache


	3. Fallout

Disclaimer: Someone else's sandbox. I just play here because its fun.

Author's Note: Well here it is, next part. Also, apparently the nominees and voting are up for the Guardians of the Earth fic awards. The info is up on my bio. It looks like there's some good stuff there, so go read and enjoy.

- + - + - + - + - + -

_No. _It couldn't be. He was mistaken. A trick of the light.

But even as the part of his mind that was still functioning tried to rationalize away the awful truth, Tommy crossed the space of the Power Chamber in a few quick steps, propelled forward by that same truth as it filled him with white hot fury. The rage became stronger with every step, rushing through him like a great river, becoming louder and more insistent until it all but drowned out that little voice of rational thought.

It wasn't until the sharp pain of his knuckles connecting with bone, as his fist slammed into Billy's face, that Tommy could hear again, and what he heard was horrible.

A sickening crack, followed by a thud, as his teammate stumbled under the force of the blow, slamming the side of his head on the console behind him, and then dropped to the ground.

_Oh God. _He'd been wrong.

Kat screaming a name that wasn't his, her voice raw and desperate.

_Oh God. _ He'd been right.

A sharp, collective intake of breath as he took another step forward, uncertain whether his intent was to help the collapsed man or kick him while he was down.

_No_. He'd been wrong. He had to have been wrong.

Then the deafening silence as Billy rolled onto his back, his green eyes flickering open to meet Tommy's, eyes which held no accusation, no surprise, simply . . . _guilt . . . resignation . . . defiance . . ._

And the rage was back, louder and more insistent than before. It screamed inside to every fiber of his body—_Kick him, beat him, kill him_. It cheered him on as his muscles tensed, as his already sore hand closed once again into a fist, as his foot drew back.

Strong arms closed around his body in the space of a thought, pinning him in place with an iron grip.

"No." Jason's voice whispered in his ear as a forearm pressed against his windpipe, the combination cutting through the rage in a way his own conscience could not. "You don't want to do this."

Still the driving anger would not be put off so easily and he continued to struggle fruitlessly against the Gold Ranger, oblivious to Tanya, Adam, and Rocky gaping at him in disbelief, to the tearing pain in his right shoulder as his friend continued to restrain him, oblivious to everything but the hands of a woman, who should have been reaching for him, tenderly caressing the face of another.

Kat knelt beside Billy, gently helping him to shift into a sitting position. Then she drew away, staring at the hand that had been cradling the back of his head, as though she'd never seen it before. For a second Tommy couldn't understand why, but as she shifted a little, the tips of her fingers moved into the light, revealing them to be covered in bright, red blood.

The mute disappointment on her face and in her eyes was a far more ringing condemnation than any words.

He'd fallen. In that moment, he'd fallen from whatever pedestal or precipice she had placed him on, and he knew it because he felt himself shatter.

All the fight rushed out him, released by his breaking, but in its wake there remained a stone of hard, cold fury, and he clung to it because that's what he had left, it was all he had left. How dare she? How dare she look at him as though he were the traitor here, as though he were the criminal?

Jason's grip on him had relaxed when he'd stopped struggling, his arm shifting from Tommy's windpipe to his chest, but he made no further move. The Red Ranger found this both irritating and oddly comforting. As his friend's whispered words had conveyed earlier, these restraints were not for the pair that knelt on floor, but for him—to keep him from having to regret his actions. But Jason needn't worry any longer. Tommy wasn't about to lash out again, to display his hurt so openly. He wouldn't give either of them the satisfaction. Dignity was all he had left.

Fury and dignity, it was a very empty combination.

Deliberately forcing his fists open, splaying his fingers out in a gesture which was unconsciously that of man waiting for the death blow, he whispered, "Its okay. I'm okay."

Jason didn't even question the declaration, his arms slid from Tommy's body like they had never been there, but he did not step back, so that his presence remained just a breath away. Perhaps he stood there because he didn't trust the sudden calm that had overtaken his friend, but perhaps it was physical declaration of his support.

The Red Ranger took comfort in the idea that it might be the latter.

They stood that way for what seemed like a ludicrously long time, facing off, two versus two, observed by three who had yet to declare their loyalties. Finally it sunk in with Tommy everyone was waiting for him to speak, to determine how this would be played out. The small courtesy rang hollow.

Licking his lips, he tried to find his voice, to figure out what he wanted to say, but he couldn't manage to think of existing outside this moment. If he spoke it would move them forward, and he might find that there was only blackness. Still he wasn't sure he could take much more of this space he occupied now, and if blackness was the other option . . . well it seemed preferable.

"You came back for her, didn't you?"

It hadn't been the words he'd intended. The question was ridiculous, the answer a foregone conclusion. Still from the moment it left his mouth, Tommy found himself waiting with baited-breath. He'd known on instinct, not for any flash of memory or sudden clarity of thought, but in the same undeniable way he knew what kicks to throw in battle or when to call the Zords. But up until now it had not been given words, denied tangible contours by the lack of a name. If Billy would simply say no, Tommy would believe him, would choose tangible words over instinctive truths because he so desperately wanted to. If Billy would simply deny what he had already confirmed with every look and gesture, Tommy would shut his eyes because being blind was easier. If Billy would simply have the decency to lie . . . Tommy would reciprocate in kind.

But Billy did not lie. He nodded slowly, his face dipping in and out of the shadows, obscuring his expression. "Yes."

"And I was so grateful . . ." Tommy felt his throat constrict as this thing which had been hovering around them became solid, suffocating him. It was the ultimate betrayal. Billy wasn't here to help, to make everything better as the ground crumbled beneath them. No, he was here to snatch away Tommy's last piece of support and leave him in free fall.

Kat shifted as though to say something, but Billy's restraining hand on her forearm caused the Pink Ranger to swallow whatever had been on the tip of her tongue.

It was a small gesture, but one of infinite power, power that Tommy had never possessed when it came Kat, and until that moment he had never known why.

He'd lost before he ever entered the battle.

He reeled with the implications, as a thousand new hurts opened up inside. Would it be like this forever? Every time he thought he'd reached bottom, been ripped apart as much as possible, would some new revelation come, smashing him to smaller pieces, grinding his dust further into the ground? It was too much. He shouldn't have to take it. Wouldn't take it.

"Get out."

Kat flinched at his words, her eyes going wide with shock. Billy, however, looked as though he'd been expecting this, had been giving up ground in preparation for exactly this fight.

"Tommy," Kat whispered, pleadingly, "don't do this."

"You _don't_ get a say anymore."

"I'm still a Ranger." She shot back, all the placation gone from her voice, but he ignored her.

"You got what you came back for, now leave."

Billy was rising to his feet, struggling a little but doing so under his own power just the same. He tried to stand, but the effort of completely supporting his own weight seemed to defeat him, and he was forced to lean back against the console for support, a move which had the unfortunate effect of giving his posture an air of casual mutiny.

"Get the hell out."

"No." The refusal was quiet, almost mockingly calm.

"We don't need you." Tommy closed his eyes in embarrassment and anger as desperation leaked into his own traitorous voice.

"Yes you do, and I'm not leaving."

Dammit! He would not plead with this man. He would not argue with him. He was the leader; this was his to command by right. Billy would not strip him of this as well.

"Leave." The edict crackled in the air, broking no argument. Powerful, sure, it rang with the certainty that it would be obeyed, every bit the leader he had been trying for.

But it had not issued from his throat.

Jason came to stand next him, his arms crossed, waiting for someone to dare to question his decision.

No one did.

Billy's gaze simply flicked to Jason, waiting patiently for further clarification, ready to abide by the decision as soon as it was explained, and with that small movement, he shifted the power as completely as any coup, with a shift of his eyes he toppled one leader and set up another.

And with that, in Tommy's mind, he secured his place in the seventh circle of hell.

Unconsciously donning the mantle he'd been passed, Jason continued to issue orders. "_All of you_ leave. Kat take Billy down to the infirmary and make sure he's not going to pass out. Rocky, we need an inventory of our supplies, what we have, what everyone's brought, what we still need. Tanya, Adam, go through the rest of the complex, make sure there's no other damage we're not aware of."

One by one everyone moved to obey. Tanya and Adam were first, the Yellow Ranger practically dragging her boyfriend behind her as though desperate to escape. Rocky was next, his eyes flicking from Ranger to Ranger as he went torn between a desire to understand what was happening and an instinctive wish not to have to witness unhappiness.

Finally Kat, her gaze pointedly anywhere but the three men left in the room, moved to take Billy's arm, but he shrugged her off and for a second Tommy thought he might not obey Jason's order after all. But then he moved, too carefully, too deliberately, like a man trying to appear sober, he made his way across the chamber, rebuffing all of Kat's attempts to help.

Tommy kept his gaze fixedly on the console Billy had just vacated, refusing to watch the maddeningly slow progression, refusing to let his eyes trail after them like a hungry dog who'd had a treat snatched from him. Instead he focused all his energy on the smear of blood that had been left by Kat's hand, trying to under how his world had just collapsed so completely.

- + - + - + - + - + -

Wrenching the doors to the Chamber closed with one last great grunt of effort, Jason allowed himself to lean against them. Resting his forehead against the cool metal, he tried to think.

Actually, it probably hadn't been a good idea to close the doors, which seemed to be a little more resistant to movement every time. They would have to keep them open from now on, lest one of them get stuck. At that thought it struck him just how desperately they needed power. Too much of the structure depended on it, everything from the environmental controls, to the shields, to the view screen. Without power they were cut off, blind and defenseless.

That should be the next thing, dividing the Rangers, putting teams together to get them back up and running—one team to work on restoring power, one team trying to locate Zordon, one team to trying to get a better sense of what they were facing. Tommy could take the latter, he'd head up working on finding Zordon, while Billy . . .

_Damn_.

Jason closed his eyes in defeat as his mind slammed up against that particular wall. He'd been stalling; deftly avoiding dealing with the defeated figure a few feet away by focusing on lists and strategies, eschewing the morass of emotions he couldn't heal, in favor of things he could fix.

But he couldn't stall any longer, this had to be dealt with, before anything else he had to negotiate a kind of truce, no matter how uneasy, because he knew one thing in his very core, whatever had done this could not be faced alone.

Turning, he made his way to the center of the room, so that he stood with Tommy in the midst of the destruction, which had been cast even further into shadow by the others taking some of the flashlights as they left. The other man didn't turn. Jason hadn't expected him to. This wasn't the kind of conversation you had face to face.

So he turned his gaze to the great black monolith on his left, trying to imagine Zordon there, looking down on them, trying to draw strength from the ideal, trying to believe that his mentor was still out there somewhere watching over them. He wanted to think that this would not have happened if Zordon were here, but of course it had, every step leading to this moment had happened right beneath his nose, but perhaps it would not have blown up quite so spectacularly . . . then again perhaps it would have, perhaps even Zordon did not have the power to forestall human emotion . . .

Still there were certain things that would not happen with Zordon here, and Jason would not let them happen in his absence.

"He has to stay."

He didn't know what he had expected his friend to do, but he had expected Tommy to do something—argue with him, scream, hit things, even cry—any of those would not have been particularly shocking at this moment. But the Red Ranger did nothing, simply continued to stand there as though Jason had not said anything. In a man of action the complete absence of such was a testament to just how deeply the wounds went.

Finally, just when Jason was about to reach out and shake him, he spoke.

"I held her . . . when Billy left . . . I held her for hours . . . for days . . ." The words coming haltingly, as though he really couldn't figure out why he was saying any of this.

Behind him, the Gold Ranger found himself fighting a personal battle of his own. He was responsible for this, just as much as any of the others. If he had been more vocal, if he hadn't been so reluctant to upset the pleasant status quo, if he had spoken up . . . if just once he had said something to any one of them, he could have stopped this. It felt dirty, standing here, listening to his friend pour out his heart's pain, and knowing that he was just as big a traitor. He wanted to stop it, to hold up his hands and whisper _I am unclean, I cannot be your confessor, when it is I who have sinned_. Yet at the same time he knew that Tommy needed this, needed him, to refuse his friend that would be a far worse betrayal. This was his responsibility to carry, his burden to shoulder. So he stayed rooted to his spot accepting the punishment as his due.

"She cried for so long . . . and I just kept holding her, kept thinking we'll get through this, I have to get her through this because no one deserves this much pain . . ." Tommy scoffed at that. It was a bitter, empty sound. "And the whole time I held her, there was this part of me that was _so_ angry . . . I was angry with her for crying so much because she wouldn't smile the way she used when I took her out, and I was angry with Billy because he had left her like this, but you want to know the really twisted thing . . . I was mostly angry with myself, because I thought . . . I thought, what kind of a man am I? What kind of man can watch the woman he loves suffer that much and be angry because she won't get over losing her best-friend fast enough to suit him?"

He turned on Jason now, as though expecting him to attempt an answer. When he didn't, Tommy's mouth twisted into an awful, pained smile, made more so by the few scattered lights left in the Chamber.

"Yeah, that's what I thought, too," he said as though Jason had voiced his opinion, "so I've gone these past few months hating myself, but it turns out . . ."

Tommy's voice broke, and he wheeled back around, unwilling to let anyone, even his best friend, see him cry. Taking a deep shuddering breath to forestall the tears, he whispered, "Well, maybe I'm not such a jerk, maybe some part of me just knew already."

His fingers reached out to trace the smear of dried blood that marred the shield panel, and then with a great crash, his hand closed into fist and slammed into that exact spot.

"I don't want to see either of them."

It took Jason a moment to process that Tommy was answering his earlier declaration that Billy had to stay. He sighed.

"That's not going to be possible."

Tommy's hand uncoiled, so that he was now gripping the console, his shoulders hunched in resignation. "I know."

Jason felt like he should say something, but he didn't know what. Part of him wanted to explain Billy and Kat's actions as best he could, to assure Tommy that this had never been about hurting him, but that would be too much like defending what was, at least in Tommy's eyes, indefensible. Part of him wanted to join in the fray, to help bolster his friend's anger with his own, because he was angry. They couldn't afford this kind of division and it seemed incredibly selfish that others were allowing their own emotions to create it, leaving him alone to try to spam the chasm. But that would serve no purpose except to create an even greater rift.

So instead he said, "We need power, and we need to try to figure what's happened to Zordon."

The Red Ranger lifted his head to stare off at the far wall, thinking out loud, "We all know this isn't the Machine Empire."

"Yes."

"But there's every possibility they're still out there, and this would be the perfect time to attack. We need to make sure both our powers and the Zords are functional as soon as possible."

"I'll get-" Jason stopped himself short from saying 'Kat', "someone on it. It's probably best we try to divide into teams, so we can get things accomplished quickly."

"That's fine." Tommy nodded his head.

Unable to think of anything else that he wanted to say or could say, Jason turned to make his way out of the room. He had only taken a few steps when Tommy's voice drew him up short.

"I can't be alone with him."

Turning to look at him questioningly, Jason responded, "I can't promise—"

"I _cannot_ be alone with him. I don't know . . . what I might . . ." His voice was desperate. "I don't think I would have stopped. If you hadn't . . ."

"You would have stopped." Jason reassured him with complete trust in what he was saying. True it had been a long time since the last time he had ever seen Tommy lash out like, completely out of control, but the his friend was, above all things, a virtuous man. He would have stopped.

"I don't know." Tommy turned to face him, his eyes pleading for reassurance that he was not a monster. "If it had been Emily . . . if one of those guys at the juice bar had done more than just hit on her . . ."

"If it had been Emily, you wouldn't have been able to restrain me." They both knew it was lie. Jason was not Tommy, and he did not love Emily the way Tommy loved Kat, at least not yet, but more than anything a random guy where she worked was very different from a teammate you had to trust in order to stay alive.

"Don't let me be alone with him." Tommy whispered again.

"I'll try." It was the best he could do.

- + - + - + - + - + -

_Well now, isn't that . . . interesting?_ Beltane's lips curved in a secret smile, as she contemplated what she had just witnessed. She had only set up the ability to eavesdrop through the shield that held Zordon as a way to get a first look, to truly size up what she was taking on. Any half way competent team would have vacated a space that had been so obviously taken by an enemy, but apparently she was not dealing with competent people. _Pity_. She had been looking forward to the game almost as much as the prize.

Opening her eyes, she took a sip of tea from the mug had been holding and allowed her surrounding to come back into focus. She glanced around the restaurant . . . _the Juice Bar_ she believed it was called, well, no matter, it's tea was lovely. Setting the mug back down, her fingers played at the rim of the mug as she contemplated her next move.

The brats' illogical, overly emotional attachment to that room had yielded a fascinating little piece of drama. It was almost as though the gods were smiling upon her, if she were naïve enough to believe in gods, or vain enough to think they might be concerned with her petty little interests endeavor. Well . . . she had been called the latter several times, but no one had ever accused her of the former.

"Is there anything else I can get for you, maam?"

Looking up to tell the waitress that she would just take the check, Beltane's eyes fell on the name-badge, and she began to seriously reconsider her religious convictions.

Emily smiled down at the auburn-haired woman, who was quickly becoming her favorite customer even though she only ordered tea. It had been a crappy morning. Jason had called her way too early in the morning to say that he couldn't take her out tonight without providing any kind of satisfactory explanation. Now she was working a morning shift for absolutely no reason whatsoever, and to top it all off she'd started out her day by spilling water all over the woman in front of her.

But thank God for nice people. Instead of bitching her out the woman had just laughed and told her not to worry about it. She had a great laugh, warm and inviting, the kind that pulled you right in. Now though she was looking up at her with an strange almost contemplative expression.

"Maam?" Emily asked again, reaching down to clear the mug, "Can I do anything else for you?"

And suddenly the smile wasn't so kind. There was a flicker of something, cold and unnatural across the face that looked up at her, like she was seeing through the mask for the first time. Recoiling instinctively, Emily moved to snatch her hand away, but lean fingers had clamped around her wrist in a vise-like grip. Jerking her arm, so that she was forced to bend down, the woman hissed in a rough voice.

"Yes, I believe there just might be."

- + - + - + - + - + -

Comments and Criticism always appreciated.

Panache


	4. Allegiances

Disclaimer: Someone else's sandbox. I just play here because its fun.

Author's Note: Well here it is, next part. Bet some of you were beginning to doubt I'd hang around, weren't you?

- + - + - + - + - + -

"You knew."

Tanya didn't look up, just continued to move her flashlight along the wall in the careful grid pattern they had determined would be best to detect any damage. True, it would only pick up the destruction if it left a mark, but it was the best they could do for the moment. Pointedly ignoring Adam's statement because it would lead to places she didn't think they could afford to go right now, she declared, "Well this is just as clear as the last eleven sections we've done. You know, I'm beginning to think they were right, and whatever this is about it's not going to involve the Zords. In fact, I don't think whoever's behind this is really worried about us at all."

"Because they left the Zeo Crystal?"

She turned now. Her mouth set in a grim line, grateful that he appeared willing to put the junk aside for what she considered to be more pressing matters. "You noticed that too, huh?"

"Yeah." He followed her to the next two sections as they began the pattern over again, just as meticulously, despite the growing certainty that they would find nothing. "It didn't really register with me at first, but after what they said about the Zords, about what it must mean if whoever did this overlooked the Zords so completely . . . I mean they can't have overlooked the crystal. It was out, and we both know Zordon wouldn't have raised it . . ."

"So why didn't they take it?" She completed the thought for him.

"So why didn't they take it." He repeated in confirmation, and for a second their lights paused in contemplation of that and all the frightening implications surrounding it.

Exhaling slightly, Tanya began to move again, trying to push back worries about what she couldn't control by focusing on what she could. "I don't know, but I'm sure we'll figure it out."

Adam snorted derisively at her reassurance. "If we can figure out how to work together, and at the moment that seems to be a pretty big if."

And they were back to the subject she didn't want to be on.

"We'll work together." She made it a statement, a proclamation, trying to make it true with the words.

"Right, because you know." His voice was cold, concentrating his anger into a verbal slap. "You're privy to knowledge the rest of us aren't, is that it?"

Gripping her flashlight a little tighter as his words skirted terribly close to the truth, she merely replied, "Section 14, clear."

Adam sighed. "Section 13, clear. Are you going to answer my question?"

"I didn't know you had actually asked something you wanted answered."

"Dammit, Tan!" He turned the beam of his flashlight on her, the effect being that she suddenly felt like she was in for a less than pleasant interrogation. "You knew about Billy and Kat, didn't you?"

She sighed, trapped by the direct question, and his obvious determination to pursue this. She couldn't lie to Adam, didn't want to lie to him. "Yeah, okay, I knew."

"How long?"

"How long what?"

By the light of her own flashlight she could see him close his eyes, as though praying for patience, and her mind drifted to just a few hours ago when his eyes had flickered closed under other circumstances. Such a short while ago she had felt so safe, so connected to him. Why did things like this have to keep intruding? Why couldn't they just live their lives for two seconds?

"How long have you known?" He clarified for her, making it very apparent that he didn't think she should need clarification.

She sighed, well if he was determined to do this, they might as well do it. "Since Billy left for Aquitar."

"That long."

"Yeah." She could tell that Adam was waiting for her to continue to rush to explain her actions, but she didn't elaborate. If he was so determined to express his opinion on this, he could damn well express it.

Exhaling forcefully, he turned and ran his fingers through his hair, pacing as he searched for words. "Why didn't you-? I mean all that time you knew, and you never . . . God, Tan! Why didn't you do anything?"

"I _did_ do something. I held Kat. I made her sleep and helped her out in the Zord Bay. I got my friend through something I wouldn't wish on anyone."

"That's not what I meant."

She was growing angrier by the second. It wasn't that she didn't get why he was angry. It was impossible not to be _something_ after watching their complacent, comfortable little world shatter like that, but she resented his apparent certainty that she was somehow responsible, that this was her failing, when she wasn't really sure it was anyone's. What had Adam expected her to do, paint her best friend with a scarlet letter?

"Okay, let's talk about what you did mean. What exactly do you think I should have done? Outline it for me."

Her boyfriend's jaw worked convulsively. Obviously he had not thought through the specifics of this, just simply jumped in headfirst with the assumption that there had to have been a way to avert this disaster, to tailor people's emotions back into the acceptable limits. It was a nice fantasy, but a fantasy all the same.

He finally settled for the most useless statement possible. "You should have said something."

"To who? To Tommy? Is that it? Should I have drawn Tommy off to the side, and said listen, I'm not one hundred percent sure, but I think Kat's gone and fallen for Billy and he might have fallen back just as hard, not that you'd ever know it because he's half-a-galaxy away, but anyway I just thought you should know that she's coming apart at the seams because he's left her so you should . . . what Adam? How should I have ended that?"

Slumping petulantly against the wall, Adam sighed, "I don't know."

"Exactly."

"Still . . . you could have told someone."

"Who else was there to tell? Jason? That's half a step away from telling Tommy."

"Are you really that dense? There was _me_,Tan. There was always me . . ."

She stood there dumbly, for once absolutely bereft of words. Though she couldn't make out his expression in the dark corridor, she could hear the bone deep ache in his words. This was why he was so angry. Not because she hadn't averted disaster, not because of their teammate's transgression, but because she hadn't confided in him, because she had shut him out. Suddenly, Tanya felt very small.

Pushing off the wall, he came to stand in front of her, and placing a hand on either side of her face, he tilted it up to his, and they stood there so close that she could make out his eyes, even in the darkness.

"There's always me." He whispered, brushing his lips against hers in soft reassurance but not forgiveness. "I just wish you would trust me enough to know that."

"I do trust you." She protested quietly, burying her head in the crook of his neck.

"Just not with this."

"No. I- it wasn't really my secret to share. It was Kat's, and I couldn't betray her trust. I mean . . . Adam, what if Billy had never come back? What if he had stayed there with Cestria, but it had gotten out all the same? Where would that have left her?"

"You really don't understand, do you?" Adam sighed, and stepping back to hold her at arms length, he forced her to meet his eyes. "It wouldn't have gotten out, at least not from your telling me. I might have thought it was horrible decision. I might have argued with you about it, but if you had told me not to say anything . . . _I would not have said a single word_, until you told me otherwise. I love you, Tan. To me there's no you, no me, just us. I want to keep your secrets. I want to share your burdens. Why won't you give me the chance to prove that to you?"

He held her like that for a long time, at arms length, waiting to be invited in or pushed away. Tanya knew which she wanted, but felt immobilized by his declaration. Did he really know what he was saying? Did he really want to be an us with her? She was loud and brash. Half the time she said or did the wrong thing, and he was . . . he was perfect. Why would he want to be an us with someone who would ruin his perfection?

"It wasn't my secret to share." She repeated feebly.

"Dammit, Tan!" Adam released her, and with a resigned slump in his shoulders, moved past her down the corridor.

"Adam, wait--" She hesitated when he turned to look at her, but she wanted him to share her secrets and shoulder her burdens, just as much as he claimed to want it, and there was no better place to start than here.

"I- I see things."

"See things?" He repeated incredulously.

"Like Billy and Kat. I didn't know because one of them told me, or because I saw them kissing, which I don't they'd actually done." The words were coming out in a horrible, jumbled mass as she rushed to try to make him understand, "I just knew because sometimes . . . sometimes I can see- feel- I don't know what to call it, but I'll just get this sense of what's going to happen or that something's going to happen."

He stood so still that she thought maybe she'd gone too far too fast. "Adam . . . say something . . ."

For a moment she didn't think he would, then slowly, gently, he gathered her into his arms. "Tell me."

"I'm not crazy."

"I know, so tell me."

"It's not like I think I'm psychic or anything."

"But sometimes you see things?" It could have been mocking, but it wasn't.

She nodded. "It's not always that definite, and it's not like I can control it or anything. It just kind of comes . . . Mma Makutsi . . ."

The name came unbidden to her lips, long ago forgotten, now newly remembered. And at the name that same large, laughing, booming voice filled her head once again, but now new words accompanied the oft remembered phrase

_Stop being so concerned with what is child; your mind cannot be bothered with such things, when it is filled with what will be . . . You will know. When the time comes, you will know what is needed and you will find it in yourself._

"Tan?"

"Mma Makutsi . . ." Tanya breathed in discovery as suddenly a whole slew of memories assaulted her mind.

"Who was she?"

"She was . . ." She smiled at the now unlocked remembrance, "I guess you'd call her a mid-wife here, but it was more than that. She was an elder, a wise woman. I used to sit with her while she made remedies. She always smelled like tea."

"And she gave you this?"

"No, but she was kind of a guide. And she always said that my mind was filled with what will be and that I would know when the time comes. But I don't, Adam. I don't know anything. I can't tell exactly what's going to happen, and I can't control when or what I'm going to see. What's the point of that?"

Grunting in frustration, she stepped slightly out of his hold. "I mean, I can see that something is going on between Billy and Kat, but_ this _. . ." She gestured wildly to the surrounding darkness. "Adam, I had no clue this was coming . . . nothing! What good is having some weird sense if it doesn't tell me what's really important?"

He didn't try to give her answer, that wasn't Adam's way—to give answers when there were none. Instead he simply drew her back into his quiet embrace, and she was so grateful for that, grateful that he hadn't simply laughed in her face, grateful that he was at least making an effort to treat this seriously when she knew it must sound beyond fanciful. Finally he spoke.

"I don't know. I don't know why this is happening the way it is, but we'll figure it out together."

"So . . . you believe me? You don't think I'm crazy?" She hated that her voice was timid and pleading, like a scared little girl's, but she couldn't do anything about it. After all she _was_ scared.

In response, Adam simply kissed the crown of her head and chuckled. "Tan, we fight ten story high monsters and take orders from a giant head . . . no, I don't think you're crazy, and of course I believe you. Thank you for trusting me enough to share this."

"I do trust you. I just-" Curling her fingers into his t-shirt, she lifted her head to meet his eyes, "It really wasn't my secret to share Adam . . . can you understand that? Kat's my friend and she trusted me, just as much as I'm trusting you now."

Feeling him start to move away, Tanya dug her hands in deeper and jerked on the shirt just enough to get his attention. "You want to share my secrets, okay . . . there's nothing bigger than what I just told you, but those are my secrets not other people's."

"I would have kept it."

"I know you would have, but just think if it was Rocky, if he had told you something deeply personal, and he asked you not to share it with anyone, even me. It wouldn't be fair to force you to choose your loyalties."

"I guess." He admitted grudgingly, but continued on, "Still, with something like this . . ."

"Something like what?" Tanya probed trying to keep her voice as open as possible. She had a feeling they were now getting into the other half of this argument, the part for which she was prepared.

Adam closed his hands over hers, trapping them against his chest. "Look, I know you're going to try to tell me that they have a right to be with who they want, and it shouldn't be any of our business, but the fact is what just happened up there is the exact reason why it is our business, why it has to be our business. It might suck. It might unfair, but it's still reality."

She had been fighting him all throughout this speech, but he refused to let go. Of course he was right in his way, just as he was so often. It was a quality she found alternately awe-inspiring and infuriating, sometimes both at the same time. This was one of those times.

Finally giving up, she rested her forehead on his shoulder with a weary sigh. "I just kept thinking to myself that if it had been you and me, I would have flipped Zordon the bird before I let someone stop me."

"And I keep thinking that if it had been you and Rocky, even Zordon wouldn't have kept me from decking him."

"Why am I being decked?"

Squinting a little at the beam of light that had suddenly illuminated the corridor, both Tanya and Adam looked up to find Rocky silhouetted in the doorway that led to one of the storage rooms.

Minutely shifting their positions so that Rocky was now physically included in the conversation, Adam evaded the question. "No reason."

Glancing back and forth between the pair, the Blue Ranger harrumphed in a way that made it clear he was not buying it. "You're talking about what just happened up there, aren't you?"

When neither of them answered, he let out a derisive snort that told them they might as well have. "That's what I thought. Well, in case anyone's wondering, which I'm sure you aren't, I have completed the incredibly important task of inventorying our food supplies, and can proudly say that we have ten bags of chips, three jars of half-eaten peanut butter, chocolate bars of varying shapes and sizes . . . Should I go on?"

"Nah," Adam grinned, "just tell me was that the count before or after you tore into it?"

Rocky turned on him. "Okay, you know what, that's getting just a little bit old."

Tanya could feel her boyfriend take a step back at the cold resentment that laced his friend's voice. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean-"

"No, of course you didn't." Rock muttered in derision, and without giving either of them a chance to finish the conversation, he started to head up the corridor, throwing over his shoulder at the last minute, "If anyone needs me, which I doubt, I'll be up on top of the Command Center. Because someone should be acting as a lookout, while everyone is down here with their heads up their asses."

And with that he was gone, leaving a very stunned Adam and Tanya in his wake.

- + - + - + - + - + -

"Let go, Kat." Billy muttered as he shook off her concerned hands, and instead clutched onto one of the infirmary beds to steady himself.

Stifling the little scream of frustration that clawed at the back of her throat, Kat moved to retrieve the antiseptics and bandages. He'd been like this all the way down to the infirmary, refusing any assistance, snapping at her when she tried to help. And other than a few sharp comments to get her to release him, he'd said nothing.

Coming back over with what she hoped were the appropriate supplies for this kind of injury, she clipped her flashlight up in the clamp that usually held IVs or other monitoring equipment. Glaring at Billy who had somehow managed to sit just outside the pool of light, she sighed, "This isn't going to work . . . you sitting over there, not letting me touch you, not speaking to me. You can't patch yourself up, and I can't do it telekinetically, so why don't you just say what you have to say to me before you pass out and I patch you up anyway."

He didn't say anything, just continued to sit there in the darkness, so she moved the light to him. Still, when her fingers pressed gently against the base of his skull, he obeyed the silent command and tilted his head downward, fingers clenching on the bed as another wave of vertigo washed over him.

Cool water at the back of his head, slender fingers probing delicately, sometimes causing a little twitch of pain, Kat steadily tending to him, healing him, he wondered at her presumption that she could heal him after causing such destruction. But moreso he marveled at his own audacity at allowing himself to be healed, to know that those fingers would make him better, when he really shouldn't be any such thing.

"You know," she murmured conversationally, "I can never get over how so small an injury can produce so much blood."

He snorted at that, at what she was both saying and not saying with her observation. Then an antiseptic soaked cotton swab swiped along the wound, causing him to hiss at the sting.

"Are you going to say it or not?" She asked idly, moving the swab ever so slightly.

He hissed again. "Are you proud of yourself?"

Kat didn't say anything, but sighed almost in relief and pulled the cotton-swab away to replace it with something else that felt wonderfully soothing.

It irked him.

"So, are you?"

"No."

"Then _why_?" he whispered in disbelief, "Why did you force the issue? And don't tell me you didn't."

She pressed a small mirror into his hand. "Can this mend without stitches? Because if not you're going to have to talk me through that part."

Raising the mirror and angling it carefully until he had got a clear view of the cut, he surveyed the damage with a critical eye. Ragged, but small, it rested an inch behind his right ear, a little more pressure, a few centimeters closer, and he would have been unconscious, probably averting this whole disaster.

"It would probably be better with stitches done by a professional, but I think in this case a bandage would be just as good."

If she noticed the almost intended slight, she didn't rise to the bait, just took back the mirror and moved in the darkness to one of the cabinets. When she stumbled a little, Billy reached up and turned the flashlight to follow her progress.

She raised two packages of bandages in question. He pointed to the slightly smaller one.

Turning back around, to put the bandages back in the cabinet, she said very quietly, "I was stupid enough to let you leave me once. I wasn't going to make the same mistake again."

"I wasn't leaving you." Billy protested, but she could hear the lie, so tiny that he probably didn't even realize it was there.

"Weren't you? Kat, we can't be together right now. Kat go with Tommy. Kat take comfort in Tommy not me. You'd already resigned yourself to letting go. I could see it in you eyes up there, and if you thought I wasn't going to fight that you're crazy."

"So you just decided-"

She cut him off. "Yeah, I just decided. I made a unilateral decision about our relationship. Gee, I wonder where I learned that from?"

Billy pressed his lips together in a thin line, as though stifling his own set of acid retorts, but at least he had the grace to look slightly abashed. "When did you take up sarcasm?"

"I've picked up more from you than just how to use a microwelder. Besides, Miguel doesn't respect anything else."

He actually laughed a little at that, just a small snort, but a laugh all the same. "He always was impudent."

"Yeah well he's graduated to down-right insubordinate with me. Things don't work right around here without you." And then suddenly she was in front of him, her vision blurred by unspent tears, and she couldn't quite figure out how she had crossed the room so quickly. "I don't work right without you, anymore."

He should still be angry with her, he rationalized; he should be furious that her actions had put them in this untenable, dangerous position. He should be up in the Power Chamber with all his wits about him, working with the others, feeding off their unquestioning trust that he would find the answer. He should _want _to be up there now, but he didn't, he wanted to be right here, hands tangled in pale gold curls, mouth opening to her sweetness, and that was perhaps the most dangerous thing of all.

Tearing his mouth away in a fit of nearly inhuman willpower, but giving into the temptation to leave his hands her hair, he whispered, "I don't think I've ever worked quite right before you."

"Forgive me," she murmured.

"I don't even know exactly what you have to be sorry for anymore."

"I don't either, but I have them and I am sorry, so forgive me."

"Yes. Of course. Always."

- + - + - + - + - + -

Poking his head through the trap door, Adam squinted at brilliance of the sun, made blinding by the comparative darkness he had just left.

Rocky had turned at the noise, but upon seeing Adam, shifted his gaze back to the desert. "What? Are we dangerously low on peanut butter or something?"

Adam didn't say anything, just came to sit beside his friend. After ten years together, he had learned Rocky, all his wild twists and turns, all his diversionary tactics—comedy to disguise insecurity, laughter to cover pain, anger to mask fear.

Unscrewing, the cap to the water bottle, he took a swig, and then offered it to the Blue Ranger only belatedly noticing the little line of supplies set out on the other side—two water bottles, beef jerky, and binoculars.

Trying to repair the mistake, he said, "That was smart bringing the binoculars. I didn't even think about need to be able to keep watch without the view screen."

Rocky snorted, "I didn't either. Jason brought them. He's very smart about things like that."

Adam fell silent, trying to regroup.

"Did you know?" His friend's voice was casual, but there was a tremor underneath.

"No. Tanya did though."

"Yeah, I'd figured on that. So that makes three of us."

"Wait, three?"

"You, me, and Tommy."

"But what about . . ."

"Jason?" Rocky completed for him, shaking his head in condemnation, "No, he knew. I could see it on his face. Completely unsurprised. So that leaves us with three, and you can't really count Tommy, so really only two. Not very many is it?"

"Very many what?" Adam felt like there was an extra layer to this conversation, something he couldn't quite latch on to.

"Very many people we can count on, people who'll be smart. That was a stupid move all of them made, hiding that, like it wouldn't blow up in our faces, and now they're all tangled up in it, distracted, so that just leaves you and me. You and me to keep everyone focused, in check."

For his part, the Green Ranger just gaped at his comrade. He couldn't think of him as his friend, because right now Rocky was more a Ranger than anything else. Everyone forgot, even Adam, that the young man sitting next to him had once been a Red, a leader, and now was a Blue, a strategist, but there he sat, doing just what his colors said he was made to—parsing the situation, analyzing the issues, and making decisions with all the necessary impartial ruthlessness.

"No," Adam murmured, "that's not very many at all."

They fell silent again, Rocky scanning the desert, Adam turning to survey the craggy rock face behind them.

"So how scared are you?" Adam asked casually after what he felt was a sufficient effort at pretense.

"Shitless. I am scared absolutely shitless."

"Me too. Tanya thinks that whoever did this isn't really all that worried about us."

"I think she's right, that's why I'm scared."

Adam had been about to ask what he thought this was about, when a hand clamped down on his shoulder, and Rocky whispered his name in a voice that could only be described as terrified.

Whirling to look out at the empty landscape, Adam gasped at the realization that it was no longer so empty. Instead, the dirt was ablaze with unnatural fire, and walking towards the conflagration was a lone figure.

They watched in transfixed horror, as the figure neared the fire without hesitation, realizing only a second too late it's intent. And then it had stepped into the fire, and Rocky lurched forward as though he would hurl himself off the roof in an effort to stop this obscene display.

But then the fire wasn't there at all. It had died to nothingness, leaving only scorch marks in its wake, and now Adam could see that the fire had not been an uncontrolled blazed at all, for there in the charred earth lay words:

_COME OUT COME OUT _

_WHEREVER YOU ARE._

Rocky who had raised the binoculars to his face looking not at the taunt, but rather the individual who now stood in its midst, emitted strangled cry, "Oh my God. It's Emily!"

- + - + - + - + - + -

Comments and Criticism appreciated as always.

Panache


	5. The Sting of Flesh Wounds

Disclaimer: You all know the drill by now. Say it with me, "It's someone else's sandbox . . ."

Author's Note: _The cat came back, the very next day . . ._ You know you couldn't get rid of me that easily. So here it is the next very not slow, very not stewy installment of ICF. I hope this restores your faith.

Dedication: Dedicated to all those reviewers who have called me on my bluffs.

- + - + - + - + - + -

Crouching down, Beltane ran strong, cruelly elegant fingers along the contours of the rock face, as she surveyed the results of her handiwork. It was a pleasing dichotomy—the wonderfully eerie scene created by her lovely, young waitress, and the contrasting buzz of tightly checked fear that played in her mind's eye, as the Rangers struggled to grasp exactly what this little turn of events meant.

The girl really had been an amazing stroke of luck; a gamble, certainly, to use so much power when she couldn't be absolutely sure that she even had the right girl, or of the young man's depth of feeling. No doubt her sister would have disapproved immensely—a deviation from the plan, an alteration in course not because anything had been closed to her, but simply because a more intriguing avenue had opened up.

Fingers clenching over a piece of sandstone, she absently ground the small rock to dust, her mouth twisting in a parody of a smile. Dulcea always had been disappointingly unimaginative, rigid to the point of brittle. For her part, Beltane still regarded it as somewhat of a minor miracle that her sister hadn't perished in some terribly fruitless battle because all the rules, plans, and destinies dictated that she stand and fight when the perfectly obvious course of action was to run away. After all, the warrior queen, guardian, witch . . . whatever the hell . . . of Phaedos had certainly never forgiven her black sheep of a sister for doing precisely that. No, Dulcea wouldn't know a good gamble if four aces dropped into her lap.

Granted Emily hadn't been such a sure bet, but the payoff was proving to be magnificent. She felt like laughing, watching the poor dears huddle together in the dim light, trying to pretend that they had the resources, both physical and emotional, to face this one little girl together, when they couldn't even decide between themselves whether to face her at all.

But even better than the chaos, was him . . . stalwart, strong, so powerful in his presence that she found her eye naturally drawn to him, as though he had somehow through force of will turned the shadows to act against their nature, to highlight him rather than shelter.

And she could see the cracks . . .

* * *

"What do you mean she's just standing there? What the hell happened?" Jason asked, his eyes pinning Adam and Rocky to the console that was now serving the only purpose it could fulfill, as physical support. Aware that his gaze currently directed all his rage at the two who had the unfortunate task of playing messenger, he still made no effort to shift it, or reign in his emotion. The words coming out of the pairs' mouths were so incredible, so unfathomable, that they had to be a joke, had to be some twisted, sick attempt at . . . something that was far away from the truth, because if it wasn't . . . 

_God! Emily!_

Even with Adam's colorless face and Rocky's uncharacteristically grim expression, Jason rebelled against the idea, refusing to accept the picture being painted before him.

"Just what I said," Rocky repeated with infinite patience, "This fire came out of nowhere, and she's walking towards it like it didn't even exist. Except it was there, I mean could feel the heat from all the way . . . but she just keeps walking, getting closer and closer with stopping once, until . . . I mean, I thought she was going-"

He broke off, unable to voice the fear, the horror that had only minutes ago been so real, and he had been so powerless.

Adam took up the tale. "But it went out. The moment she stepped in-" He snapped his fingers. "-gone, like it was never there, like it was just waiting for her, and the only thing left are words burned into the ground."

"And Emily," Jason completed, needing to taste the idea on his tongue, as though by adding to the tale himself, he would somehow believe it.

"And Emily," Adam confirmed.

"But now she's just standing there." Rocky lifted his head to meet Jason's eyes. "Waiting for us."

Disquiet settled over the group like a tangible veil, each thinking the same thing. It had never been like this before. Never this brutally simplistic. Never this personal. And for six of them it still wasn't, Jason thought. This was designed for him.

"She's waiting for me."

He was unaware of voicing the thought, until Tanya added quietly, "To do what?"

The answers were immediate, obvious. _To save her. Rescue her. Keep her safe from this._ But there was something in the Yellow Ranger's question, a warning he didn't want to hear.

Then another voice added to the warning, and this time he had to listen because doing so was instinctual.

"Jason," Every head whirled in surprise as Billy's quiet, commanding tenor cut through the chamber. It had been so long since the reedy but surprisingly compelling voice had graced the complex, that for a moment they had all forgotten he was with them. Unthinkingly, his eyes flicked over to Tommy's suddenly rigid form. Well, almost all of them.

Now, coming forward a little from the doorway, where he and Kat had been standing, markedly out of the circle, Billy forced the question. "How well do you really _know_ Emily?"

For beat none of them seemed to process the question; then there came a sharp, universal intake of breath as the implication sunk in. Jason felt his throat clog with rage, his hands clench together as he tried to force the words of derision out into a room that suddenly seemed devoid of all air.

Tommy got there first. Turning on Billy, his face contorted in a mirror of Jason's own feelings, he roared, "What the hell kind of question is that?"

"A good one." Rocky was off the console in a flash, taking a step forward and to his right, he managed to place himself at the edge of the line between the two men, not a blatant block, but effective in its threat all the same.

"It's a good question," he repeated, turning now to Jason for an answer.

Acceptance of the possibility by one of the inner circle forcing him to consider the concept as well, Jason let out a groan, dropping head to hands. Thinking of Emily's sweet face, her spunky smile, her ribald sense of humor, and how precious little he really knew of her, he shook his head dumbly.

"I don't know. I mean, there was never anything- I just don't know."

"So it's a possibility," Billy sighed.

"God, would you just shut up already!" Tommy spat. "Yeah, it's a possibility, but it's not the only one. Hell, it's not even the most likely, so stop gloating over how deviously your mind works."

A strong hand clamped down on Jason's shoulder, and Tommy shook him a little in support. "We'll get her back, bro. If there's any way . . . we'll get her back."

"And if there's not? If she's really-" he broke off, unable to even voice the possibility.

"Then one of us will deal with it. It won't be your fight." With one final clap of his shoulder, the Red Ranger moved away.

"So what do we do now?" Adam asked, bringing them all back to the unfortunate reality that they still had no plan.

"We go out there, and we finally face this thing head on."

"You are aware that this is probably a trap."

Tommy didn't even deign to look at Billy this time. "Yes, we are all aware. We haven't survived for months without your glorious presence by being oblivious to what is fucking obvious to anyone with a brain! But we don't leave people out there because we're afraid for our own skin."

Billy hissed sharply, and for a second looked as though he were prepared to give as good as he got. Then all the fight left, and turning sharply on his heel, he returned to his exile, slumping resignedly against the door.

Sweeping his gaze around the chamber in a move that simultaneously dared people to comment and evaluated his possibilities, Tommy began to issue orders. "Adam, Tanya, you're with Jason and me. Rocky you hang back here, just in case the idea is to take this place. We walk out there powered up, expecting a fight. We'll approach Emily as a hostage, but at the first sign of anything . . . weird, we're back on the defensive."

The omission of the pair by the door did not go unmarked, but no one commented. In Tommy's mind there was no need to give them orders because they were no longer part of the team. People who committed betrayals of their magnitude didn't stay a part of something founded on trust.

"Okay, everyone got it?"

Jason heard himself saying in a strange disconnected voice, "I'll approach Emily."

"You don't have to."

"No." He shook himself into focus. "No, if it's Emily then it's for me. It should be me."

* * *

_Yes, by all means dear boy. Approach her, be the one to free her._

Beltane smiled. Small hairline fractures were beginning to appear in his marvelous, ever-present control. She had put them there, and she would force them wider. She would break him open, simultaneously unleashing his power and relieving him of it. Already her fingers twitched at the thought of it, power so elusive and so dynamic that the irony of installing it in this particularly rigid soul, this black knight was almost peculiar and certainly unintentional.

_Don't worry, in a little while all that guilt will be gone, and you won't feel anything at all._

_

* * *

_  
The day was oppressively, unnaturally hot, and despite the protection afforded by their body armor, the shift from the still relative cool of the underground complex to the stifling hea of the desert blasted against them in seemingly wave after wave, as though hell truly had relocated and they were fighting the devil.

_And maybe we are_.

It had been a fleeting, ludicrous thought born out of gallows humor, but as he stood out on the cliff, staring in horror at the mockingly peaceful scene below, it hardened into a core of truth. In the middle of the taunt, writ large in scars across the land, Emily stood so calmly, so blithely that there was only one possible conclusion . . . well, only one conclusion he was willing to entertain . . . she wasn't in control of her body.

Somehow it was the lack of chains that made his blood run cold, for in the absence of any visible restraint, his mind supplied a thousand imagined prisons.

Tanya's whispered, "Oh My God," as she came up behind him, told Jason that he was not alone in his thoughts.

Yes, they well might be fighting the devil, or at the very least one of his more ardent followers.

Tommy came up beside him and muttered, "Well, we've come out. Your turn, you sadistic bastard."

Jason didn't respond, but beneath his helmet a bleak smile flitted across his face. The desperate plea hidden beneath his friend's rough words had a kind of comfort to it because it was spoken.

Silence had marked this day, carved it out from all the others. Gone were the traded insults, the quirky bravado of awful puns shouted into the air. Gone were the yells of intent to hype themselves up. Even the morphing process had been almost silent; simple commands said barely above a whisper, only loud enough to activate the controls, and followed, not by immediate transport to the heat of battle, but the grim, silent march of soldiers, ever forward to the front lines.

And now they stood there, poised at the edge of battle, but no enemy looked back at them across the no man's land, just one solitary, fragile girl.

"So," Adam broke the silence, "what do we do now?"

By way of answer, Tommy turned to Jason. "Are you sure you still want to do this?"

No, he was not sure at all. She looked so blank, so devoid of any life . . .

"Yeah," The Gold Ranger nodded before the fear took over and he backed out, "Yeah, it's gotta be me anyway."

If the uncertainty had crept into his voice, Tommy did him the courtesy of failing to notice. "Okay, Tanya stay up high and watch out for anyone coming up on us. Adam and I will go down with you, protect your back."

_And step in if you can't do it._

The words went unsaid, but the reassurance was there all the same.

They made their way down the rock face carefully, expecting with every step to suddenly face an army of minions, to awaken the sleeping enemy with every rock that went skittering out from underfoot.

But it never came, and suddenly they were at the bottom. Still there was just Emily, just the woman who had come closest to wiping away all his regrets regarding Trini. Damnit she shouldn't be here! She shouldn't have been drawn into this!

Emily was the physical representation of everything he loved about Angel Grove, all his hopes for a future here. Innocent, unscarred, she hadn't witnessed the destruction of homes by her own hand, hadn't watched the blood seep out of her body, or fought one of her friends with the knowledge that it very well might come down to her or them. She had battled her demons, but they had never taken corporeal form. Emily fought the good fight of life, with the kind of gusto that he always felt too weary to manage, and he had loved her for that.

Now because she had been stupid enough, brave enough, to love him back, she was here, held prisoner by an enemy that had already managed to take Zordon from them.

He'd be damned if it got her too!

At this thought, he took two firm steps out in front of Adam and Tommy, drawing the blank gaze to him. The others held back as he continued to walk towards her, cautiously, extending an open palm in the type of placating gesture one might use with skittish animals.

_It's okay baby. I'm here. I've got you._

But the eyes that looked back at him held neither fear nor recognition. While he hadn't been expecting the latter since his helmet obscured his face, the cold indifference shook him. She watched him walk towards her the way one might examine an only marginally interesting insect before finally getting up from the dinner table to squash it.

He kept walking, waiting for the moment when he crossed that invisible trip-wire and the trap was sprung, but as he inched closer and closer he had the sinking sick feeling that Emily _was _the trap. Now he could make out her eyes, but they weren't the sweet, sparkling green he so loved. Bleached free of all color, the only way to tell they were moving was to follow the now jet-black veins that rimmed the edges.

The sight snapped him back into the defensive, re-honed the battle-ready edge with which he would usually approach such a situation. Emily had been chosen to upset him, to force him off his game and get him to drop his guard. He couldn't let that happen, couldn't allow their unseen enemy to dictate the terms.

Closing the last few feet of space between them, he tried to approach her as he would any other civilian in this situation.

"Miss? Miss, I'm the Gold Ranger. We're here to help you. Can you move?" When no response came, he touched her shoulder tentatively. "I'm going to pick you up and take you out of here, okay? You're going to be okay."

It was like a switch had been thrown. She blinked and it was no longer those white empty orbs, but rather Emily's pretty green eyes that looked up at him. A little knot in his heart loosened.

And then she screamed.

Raw and terrified, her scream echoed against the cliffs as she stared at him with an expression of sheer terror. Instinctively he turned to look for the threat coming up behind him, to see what horrible creature Adam and Tommy were trying to ward off.

But there was nothing there, just clear sky, a relentless sun, and his teammates moving towards him at a dead run. He heard a scuffle, whirled around just in time to see Emily take off, hobbling along the rough terrain on those impractical heeled sandals she adored, still screaming at the top of her lungs.

"Help me! Oh God, please, somebody help me!"

Shit, she was scared of them!

Without turning to the others, he yelled, "Stay back. It's us. She thinks we're the enemy!"

Then he took off after her, not waiting to see if his teammates really understood. Catching up with her wasn't the problem, her footwear and his enhanced speed made sure of that, but as soon as he reached her, the moment he made contact, she went ballistic—kicking, scratching, biting.

Clumsy and inept, her attacks did no physical harm, every blow deflected almost effortlessly by his body armor; psychologically, however, the fight was beginning to take its toll.

He recognized a few of the tactics that he had taught her as basic self-defense. Not a formal attack style, but dirty fighting, the kind designed to get you free so you could run far and fast. She took any avenue open to her. If he didn't protect his face she tried to claw at the spot where his eyes should be. If he left open his lower body, she kicked out viciously, stomping on his toes with the heel of her shoes, kicking his shins, and once even landed a very sharp kick to the groin that made him profoundly grateful for superhero level protection. The entire time she never stopped screaming, never stopped pleading for help.

_I want to baby. Please, just let me._

But her pleas, her tear-streaked face, the raw screams that were getting weaker as her voice started to give, were getting to him, making him truly feel like an attacker, like something to be feared. When he finally got his moment, when the fight in her started to flag a little, it was all he could do to make himself take it.

Catching up with her after she had taken off once again, he came up from behind, wrapping his arms around her body, pinning her arms to her sides. Drawing her close to his body, he tried to get through to her. "Emily, it's me. Shhh, you're okay. It's me. I've got you."

"Oh God. Don't hurt me." She whimpered desperately. "I'll give you anything you want, _do anything._ Just please . . . please don't kill me."

Shocked by her words, his grip loosened fractionally, and instantly she was fighting again—kicking out with her feet, clawing at his arms with her fingers, slamming her head backwards.

At the first sickening crack of her skull against his helmet, he released her, but not before he'd gotten a good look at her fingers—ripped to shreds and bloody from where she had clawed off fingernails against his suit. Now blood poured from the back of her head, caking in her hair. It hadn't occurred to him that not only did his suit protect him, but it hurt her. Damn, she might as well be repeatedly slamming into concrete! It was almost as if somehow every pain sensor in her body had been flipped off.

And if he let her keep at it, she could literally beat herself to death.

For the briefest of instances he considered leaving her, thought about simply turning and walking away, releasing her from this nightmare scenario, but someone had brought her out here, had placed her in this mental prison, and he couldn't leave her to them, even if it meant he had to become the thing that went bump in the night.

Resolve momentarily strengthened, he went after her once again, this time grabbing her left arm and twisting it behind in an effort to keep her still long enough to deliver a knockout blow. But despite trying to use as little pressure as possible, he underestimated the force, and there was a horrible pop as he tore her shoulder out of joint.

He couldn't deliver any kind of blow while like this. His powers weren't designed to fight humans. One miscalculation and he wouldn't knock her out. He'd kill her.

Praying that Tommy and Adam would understand what was happening or at least have the good sense not to interfere, Jason powered down.

The moment he did so, he knew he'd made a mistake.

Emily's sobbing, pain-wracked form, suddenly straightened and with one well placed elbow to his gut, she wrenched herself free, and turned on him, no longer the terrified victim. Her eyes had gone back to the empty nothingness that he now realized meant she was someone else's puppet.

There was a flash of something in her hand, and then she launched herself at him with renewed viciousness. The attacks were no longer desperate defensive blows, but clean, precise moves, moves Emily had never known.

He should have powered back up, but it was still Emily's body, Emily's strength, and prior to this she had managed to beat herself to a bloody pulp. If he let her fight him like that it would be no better than before, the damage would simply be different. So instead he parried the blows as best he could.

Over Emily's shoulder he could see Adam and Tommy running towards him, obviously having realized that something had changed. Terror gripping him, he yelled, "Power down! You'll kill her if you attack like that. Power down, dammit!"

The two Rangers looked at each other briefly, and then by some unspoken agreement, Adam pulled up short, and Tommy kept moving towards them, powering down in mid-run.

But Jason's focus was already wholly back on Emily, on fending her off without inflicting anymore damage, and then he saw it again, the flash of something metallic in her hand as she reached out.

She wasn't trying to punch him, she was trying to . . . what? Knife him? Bludgeon him? Bug him?

Whatever it was, it was obviously the entire focus of her efforts. She was letting herself take more and more of beating as she reached single-mindedly just behind his ear. Grabbing her wrist just in time, he twisted it in an effort to see what she held, but still he couldn't tell.

Then Tommy was there, pinning her to him in a mirror of the hold Jason had used on him. She fought, but by now her strength was waning, and tensing his muscles, the Red Ranger managed to hold her steady. Meeting his friend's eyes, he reassured him, "I've got her. Do it."

Mentally measuring just right amount force, Jason flattened his hand into a firm plane and lifted it to deliver a medium karate chop to her right temple. "I'm sorry, Emily."

In mid-strike her eyes cleared to look up at him in worshipful joy and confusion. "Jason?"

And then his hand struck the soft flesh on the side of her head, and she crumpled.

* * *

From her vantage point at the top of the ridge, Beltane clapped softly. "All hail the conquering hero."

_Crack_.

- + - + - + - + - + -

Well, there you are. Still reading?

Panache

P.S. I wrote a Rocky story a few weeks ago that I'm rather proud of, if you haven't read it yet I'd love to know your opinions in particular.


	6. Discoveries in Blood

Disclaimer: You all know the drill by now. Say it with me, "It's someone else's sandbox . . ."

Author's Note: Just in case you guys thought I'd forget about this, with Old Soldiers in the works.

* * *

_This is what people feel as they go mad_, Rocky thought as he clenched and unclenched his hands for what had to be the hundredth time. This oppressive helplessness of knowing that things were happening—out of sight, just beyond your hearing, horrible, earth-shattering things were happening to those you love—and you couldn't do a damned thing about it. 

He jumped at every creak, every groan of the supports, even moving into a defensive stance once when Billy dropped a wrench.

That really was the most maddening part of all, to know a thing with absolute certainty, the kind woven into your soul, the way you knew there was a God or you loved your family, and realizing that you might be the only one with this knowledge, the sole prophet in a world of nonbelievers.

Not that he truly believed either Kat or Billy thought there was nothing happening, but they accepted it all with such resignation.

He realized the assignment might be a kind of punishment. That because he'd dared to side with Billy, Tommy had, consciously or unconsciously, grouped him with the traitors, taken him out of the fight. Yet there was nothing to be done. Indeed, nothing he really wanted to do. The team was already fractured enough. A petty quibble served no purpose, expect to destroy, particularly when the post had to be assigned to someone. So if he had to do his time in the trenches to keep the peace, he could do that without squabble or insult. He _would_ do that.

Still it would have been nice to be left with better companions.

Passive aggressive to the extreme, the couple hadn't even waited for the others to leave before taking up self-assigned posts, in a silent statement that they might be ignored but not sidelined. Kat powered-up with the others, moving to stand guard at the entrance that led down to her precious Zords; likewise, Billy clenched a small pocket flashlight between his teeth and dropped down to examine the communications panel right next to Tommy, not even sparing the other man a look as he arranged his tools in a strange half circle.

For the first few minutes, after the others left, no one spoke, but despite his resolve to be the levelheaded one, the quiet irked Rocky, left him too much space to think.

"How can you be so damn calm about this?" He snapped, more to just hear someone say anything than out of real disgust.

Billy didn't even look up, just shifted the flashlight to the side of his mouth.

"Practice." He replied flatly, before sliding under the console.

Kat snorted in response.

And that was it. Silence descended once more, leaving Rocky to jump at every noise, half dreading, half praying-for, an attack, something tangible to do. Even as his gaze remained fixed on the darkness that led up to the Command Center, continually scanning for any kind of movement, he found his ears keying in to the soft clinks and thunks of Billy's work, so smooth, so rhythmic they were almost their own kind of music—that was a set of pliers being put down, that rustle was wires, then the hum of something he didn't recognize. He envied his predecessor, envied him his usefulness. Even in the midst of all this chaos, of trying to fight nightmares and air, Billy could do things, run his fingers along metal, whisper sweet words, flex the ever present weapon of his mind, and move seeming mountains.

As though picking up on where his thoughts had gone, the headset in his helmet flared to life, and Kat's voice whispered in his ear, "He's calm because he has to be. This is what he can do for the team, and he can only do it if he's calm."

Her words were tentative, uncertain of how they would be received, but even through the tinny quality of the headsets, her radiant admiration shown through. For his part, Rocky stayed silent, what he felt warring with what he knew. He felt like berating her, like blaming the pair for this thing because they were here and easy, but he knew it would be of no worth and more damage. Eventually someone had to answer an extended hand. And somewhere deeper inside, almost unrecognized, a tendril of his heart reached out to her, to the agonized regret that ate away at her certainty.

"He's always only cared about the team, put them first." She went on, but there was a tinge sadness mixed with the pride, a consciousness of her secondary place, that she had chosen a man who would not sacrifice all for her, who would never put the greater good at risk.

He didn't argue the obvious counterpoint to her belief; they had to move beyond the argument. "Look. I don't care."

The words came out harsher than he intended, and he sighed. "It's not necessary to convince me, Kat. I just want to get out of this alive, and that means I have to work with you two. Okay. That's fine. As I said, I don't really care. After this they can throw darts at your picture, or never talk to you again, again not my business, but right now the way I see it you two are our best resource, which means I've got your back, no reservations, no convincing necessary. Just do me a favor and don't bring it up around me again. It's not worth my energy. Got it?"

"Got it." Kat repeated, but there was relief in her words. In fact, he was certain that if he could see her face she'd be smiling.

For the first time that day, Rocky felt like smiling, too. It felt good to mend something.

The small peace was short-lived.

Static crackled next to his ear, and then Adam's voice broke through with harsh urgency. "Kat! Rocky! Billy! Can anybody read me!"

Almost simultaneously, there was the echo of feet pounding down from the Command Center. Drawing his blaster, he scanned the darkness, barely conscious of Billy moving to back him up. Only instinct caused him to shift just enough to allow the team scientist a clear shot, though with what he didn't know.

Somewhere in another portion of his brain he registered Kat responding to Adam's hails. "What do you need, Adam?"

". . . Zord Bay!"

"Open the Zord Bay!"

It took a moment for him to process the two cries, and more importantly where the second came from. He barely stood down before Tanya nearly hurled into him as she came down from the Command Center at a break-neck run. Still the two messages continued simultaneously, each almost oblivious to the other—Adam's spotty words through the static with barely enough to communicate the gist; Tanya's full phrases, but almost incoherent in their haste.

"It took control of Emily."

" . . . Emily . . . hurt . . ."

"Jason powered down."

" . . . can't . . . hurt . . . open Zord . . ."

"It was horrible!"

Billy, benefited by only having one conversation to follow, seemed to grasp the situation first. Grabbing Tanya by the shoulders he shook her firmly. "Who's hurt?"

"Emily! They can't get her up the cliff."

A flick of his eyes to Kat was all it took for the Pink Ranger to turn on her heel and take off to the Zord Bay. Turning back to Tanya, he asked, "Do you know how badly?"

The Yellow Ranger shook her head, calmer now as her battle-edge came back. "I was up top as lookout. I know its bad, but I don't know what."

"Any of the others?"

Tanya frowned, "I don't think . . . I mean it was just Emily . . ."

"Okay," Billy nodded. Apparently thinking, he turned from them and carefully set down the tools, which, Rocky now noticed, he'd been holding in a throwing grip. After a moment he asked, "The communicators in your suits are functioning, right?"

At Rocky and Tanya's nod, he breathed in relief. "All right, Tanya, radio Kat, get her to keep Emily down in the Zord Bay, it's the only place with power, and right now just as useful as the infirmary. It's probably better that we don't move her anymore than necessary anyway. Rocky, mind staying up here on watch?"

"Do I have a choice?"

Billy gave him a half-smile that communicated he knew just what he was asking. "Not really, no."

"Then I guess I don't really mind."

With a curt nod of gratitude, Billy was all business once more, turning away to direct Tanya, "I need you to stay with me, answer my questions or relay them to Adam if you can't."

And then they were gone, and Rocky was in silence again.

_This is what people feel as they go mad_.

* * *

The questions came rapid fire as Billy moved around the infirmary, deftly grabbing appropriate supplies in response to every piece of information Tanya relayed. 

"_Is anything broken?"_

"_How long has she been unconscious?"_

"_Is she still bleeding? How much blood has she lost?"_

By the time they reached the Zord Bay, Tanya had a frighteningly complete picture of exactly what they would find there.

It didn't prepare her.

They had laid Emily just inside the entrance to the Zord Bay near Tommy's Zord. In the clean, bright light, against the almost sterile-looking cement floor, she looked . . . peaceful, in some sick way—her face finally free of the terror, her screams silent. In fact, if you just looked at her face, just focused on the cracked lips and drawn complexion, you could almost imagine she was simply ill. There her skin was completely unmarked, but the rest of her body . . . that might have belonged to a different person. Up and down her arms and legs, the start of bruising stood out on parchment-pale skin—the mottled coloring, gray blue, brown-yellow, purple-black, occasionally cut by the mud-red of blood—like some macabre patchwork quilt.

Jason had been tending to her, washing away the blood with water and a cloth obtained from somewhere. His hands moved almost mechanically, like he wasn't really in the room with everyone else. At their approach, he shifted a little to the side, but kept to his task. No one made a move to stop him.

Kneeling, Billy took Emily's wrist feeling for a pulse, then lowered his head to her mouth and listened to her breathing. His face was grim when he straightened. After a brief look at Jason, he murmured quietly, "Somebody walk me through exactly what happened."

It was Tommy who answered, recounting the encounter in excruciating detail, occasionally pointing out an injury that he could attribute to one thing or another. He held Emily's head steady as Billy checked her pupils and the bruising where Jason had struck her temple, and lifted it ever so carefully at Billy's instruction so that the other man could feel along the crown and lightly bandage the area.

As he did so, Tanya could see the small pool of blood that had previously been obscured by Emily's hair and she had to fight not to turn away, to force herself to continue this private vigil that she, Adam, and Kat had undertaken. She hadn't known Emily well, none of them had except Jason, but she liked and admired her. Coming into a fully formed team, she had faced enough of her own challenges, to appreciate the special kind of spunk it took to try to be a part of this world no matter how peripherally. It was as though Emily, by shedding her biker-chick persona, had been forced to obtain a level of comfort in her own skin that even some of the Rangers lacked.

It wasn't fair! Rangers fought. They were soldiers and played on at least something approaching an even-field. At the end of the day they'd signed up for this. Emily hadn't. She probably never even realized why she'd been targeted. No part of this, even getting involved with a Ranger, had been her choice, because she'd never known. Suddenly all the months of lying to her parents, of sneaking out of the house with the excuse of extra vocal lessons, pick-up games of soft-ball, concerts she'd never seen, came back to Tanya. They'd all done it. Under the guise of protecting their loved ones, they'd robbed them of any choice, any chance to walk around with their eyes wide open.

And in the end no one had been protected at all . . .

"What the-?"

At Billy's abbreviated exclamation, Tanya's eyes flew open, and she saw him pull what looked like a thin metal disc from the back of Emily's skull. As he held it up to the light, Tanya could see the pattern of circuitry outlined by the crust of blood that had collected between the pathways.

Something cold and insidious prickled at the nape of her neck, and she brought up a hand convulsively, as though to swipe it away. But it was gone. Still she could feel the echo of the sensation, like a promise or a threat.

Billy was twisting the disc this way and that, providing a running discourse as he did so, "It's covered with circuitry. There's no way to know what exactly it's supposed to do, but . . ." he frowned down at Emily, "Well we can make a guess."

The team nodded soberly, all except Jason, who appeared to be oblivious to all of it. Then he spoke, the words coming haltingly as though from some other place. "Her hand . . . she had something in her hand. She was reaching for me."

As one everyone's eyes fixed on Emily's left hand, which was still curled in a fist. At a nod from Billy, Tommy reached down and slowly pried open her fingers. There in her palm lay a thin metal disc identical to the one Billy now held, except this one was devoid of blood. Tommy sucked in an angry breath.

"I want more than a guess. I want to know exactly what these do."

Billy nodded soberly, "You'll get it."

Then he stood.

Tommy looked at him dumbly, "I didn't mean now! Emily needs--"

Billy cut him off. "Emily needs more than I can do for her. We need to get her to a hospital."

"We can't protect her there."

"If you don't, there won't be anything to protect."

Jason flinched at the words.

"Geez, Billy . . ." Tommy whispered under his breath, his voice harsh with admonishment.

"Well, I'm sorry, but I'm working in a jury-rigged infirmary with no medical equipment, limited medical knowledge, and absolutely no way to monitor her vitals. I am telling you she needs to get to a hospital. Now are you going to argue with me about my word choice, or listen for once and take her there!"

"Shut up. Both of you." Jason's deadened words cut through the Zord Bay with the force of a bellow. Standing, he turned to Billy, "What should I tell them?"

Billy ran a weary hand over his face, and cast his eyes up to the ceiling as those he could see a catalogue of Emily's injuries writing above him. "She has a bad skull fracture, at least a concussion, and several broken bones. The head trauma is the most dangerous, but they'll know that. The important thing will be making sure she doesn't move too much while you get her there. Someone should probably go with you. I can do that."

"No!" Tanya heard her own shout before she even realized she was talking, but something compelled her forward, a sinking sensation deep in the pit of her stomach at the thought of Billy going. And then she was talking fast, her words coming from some other place, like the little gurgle of water Mma Makutsi could call from a drought-ridden land, drawn from some other place.

"It should be another Ranger, shouldn't it? Someone to walk in there powered up, so no one asks questions. Because otherwise . . ." She let the words hang, but the meaning was there. Because otherwise a man walking in with his girlfriend beaten half to death, would raise some very ugly questions.

"I'll go." Tommy volunteered.

Still the sensation didn't go away, so Tanya kept talking, "But you can't stay. If another Ranger stays that's some kind of protection, we can take shifts."

At the word 'we', the sinking sensation faded, and Tanya knew she had hit on it, repeating the words to help what she was saying sink in. "We can take shifts—Jason and me. Here, I'm not really . . . well, anyway, I'll go."

Whether anyone was going to argue or not, she'd never know, because Jason closed the subject. "You'll sit in the back with her."

As they prepared to leave, Adam grabbed her forearm and drew her to the side. "Tan, what do you know?"

She smiled a little at the worry writ large across his features, forgetting that he couldn't see her beneath the helmet she wore. "I don't know exactly. I just know . . . it couldn't be Billy or Tommy."

Stepping away from her, he clenched and unclenched his hands convulsively, then suddenly he was grabbing her shoulders again, strong fingers digging desperately into her flesh. "Could it be me? Can I go instead?"

"Adam!"

"Just tell me, dammit! You've seen something I can tell, and now you're saying it can't be Billy or Tommy, but it can be you? Well, I'm sorry, but that's not a fair exchange, not to me. So just look at me, and do whatever it is you do and _tell me_ it can be me instead."

And she did look, long and hard, and at first nothing came. "Say the words."

"What?"

"That's how I knew before. Say, 'I'll go.'"

"I'll go."

Then the sinking sensation was there again, like plummeting into darkness. She shook her head sadly. "I'm sorry Adam."

"Dammit!" He released her now, pressing his hands together in an attitude of prayer or pleading.

"I'm a Ranger, Adam. I signed up for this, I'll be okay."

"I won't. Not if you don't-- I didn't sign up for _that_. I want it to be me."

"Hey! I didn't sign up for that either!" She touched the side of his face. "I'll come back. You still owe me pancakes."

Relenting at her touch, he placed a small kiss on her palm, and whispered, "The best pancakes you've ever tasted. Chocolate chips, fresh strawberries, and whip cream."

"See, what girl wouldn't come back for that?"

* * *

Things disintegrated quickly, within moments of Jason and Tanya leaving. Billy had been contemplating the two discs like his life depended on it, then suddenly something seemed to snap into place. Closing his hand over the discs, he turned to Tommy. 

"I need you car keys."

"Wha--?"

"The discs. You want answers, don't you? Well, I can't get them here. In case you haven't noticed, I don't have any power. I need a lab."

Tommy sighed, but to his credit handed over the keys.

"I don't want you going alone." Billy looked like he was about to protest, but Tommy didn't give him the time. "I don't want anyone leaving the complex alone. From now on, if we walk out that door, we do it in pairs."

Kat took a few steps forward, but Tommy held up a hand. "Not you."

The Pink Ranger looked like she could spit nails. "This is ridiculous! What are you going to do, just order us to stay apart?"

"No! I'm going to order you to do your damn job. Billy, after you, who knows the most about this place?"

Billy sighed, "Kat."

"I need power, and I need functional Zords, and I need someone here who knows how to give me that." He had turned his back on the pair of them, so that only Adam could see the way his mask slipped, even as his voice retained the whip-crack of authority.

"Fine." Kat snapped, and Tommy flinched, just a little, but Adam saw it all the same.

"I'll go with Billy." He volunteered before Tommy could give the order that he knew coming. The Red Ranger looked like issuing another order right now might just kill him.

Tommy nodded distractedly, and Adam realized he was looking fixedly just past his shoulder, turning he looked in that direction, but there was nothing there. Then as he turned back around and saw Billy lightly touch Kat's cheek and then draw his hand away, it struck him. Tommy didn't want to have to see . . .

"Hey Billy! Ready to go?"

Billy looked once to Kat, who managed a tight smile and then jerked her head to the door.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm ready."

I wasn't until they were outside the complex, that Adam realized Billy and Kat hadn't spoken a word to each other.

* * *

"We'll have to wait for the MRI results to come back, but I can tell you that a skull fracture of this magnitude . . ." The doctor shook his head in a way that conveyed you shouldn't hope too much. "We'll have to keep her here for at least several days. I'll know more when I get the results. Let's just say you two were lucky the Power Rangers were around."

Jason pressed his fist against his mouth a little harder, and nodded dumbly. They'd been here for hours, doctors and nurses coming in and out, taking Emily away, bringing her back, running tests, pumping her full of things, and all the while nobody was telling him much of anything. The young resident sitting across from him was the first to acknowledge the presence of someone who didn't have the magic password of blood or a wedding ring.

"Can . . . can I see her?"

"We're not really supposed to for non-family, but . . . I'll see what I can do. _Is_ there family we can contact?"

"Ummm," Jason closed his eyes and tried to think. God, he hated hospitals! Why the hell did Tanya have to go get a snack just now? "Her mother is away at a business conference. I- I don't know the number."

"And her father?"

"Spain."

The doctor nodded in way that said, yes his parents were divorced, too. "I'll make sure you're allowed in."

"I'd like to sleep in the room."

The doctor frowned. "I'm afraid that's against hospital policy."

"Oh." Jason sighed, about to ask for something else, but the doctor was already walking away.

"They're all the same, aren't they?"

"Huh?" Jason didn't look up. He really didn't feel like talking.

"The doctors. They're all rules and regulations, and they've seen so much it's like they can't understand it's the first time for you. It's still scary for you."

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry. If you don't want to talk to me, you can just tell me to shut up, but if you've sat in these waiting rooms long enough, you start to look for something to distract you. Raisenet?"

Jason looked up to see a crumpled bag of Raisenets being proffered across the aisle, by a middle-aged woman in a long sleeved gray t-shirt that did nothing for her washed-out complexion.

"No thanks." He smiled wanly.

"Suit yourself, but you should know these are an excellent vintage. Hospital '96, I think." She smiled, causing the corners of her gray eyes to crinkle. Dropping Raisenets back in a bag that looked like it could swallow half the vending machine, she reached up and pulled out a hair clip allowing the pile of flyaway auburn curls to tumble down to her shoulders. "Well, it looks like we're going to be bunk mates, and since I don't sleep with strangers."

She extended a hand.

"I'm Bella."

* * *

Comments and Criticisms always appreciated.

Panache


	7. Pathways

Disclaimer: You all know the drill by now. Say it with me, "It's someone else's sandbox . . ."

Author's Note: Because when I'm good, I'm very very good . . . but when I'm bad, I'm better.

- + - + - + - + - + -

He let Adam drive, or made Adam drive or maybe Adam just took the keys from him and insisted on driving. Billy wasn't entirely sure how he got into the passenger seat of Tommy's jeep or exactly how long he'd been there. His thoughts had splintered, leaving fragments of himself scattered with the others, so that little of him actually remained here.

He was with Rocky, standing amidst the wreckage of their one-time safe-haven, eyes darting from wound to wound, drowning under the sheer volume of things he couldn't do.

He sat with Tanya and Jason, ghosting his hands over Emily's injuries, monitoring her as best he could, trying to piece her back together through sheer force of will.

He even stood with Tommy, in whatever darkness held him, picking up the shards of the enemy they'd been allowed to see, fitting and re-fitting them together in the vain hope they'd show something other than their own reflections.

But mostly he was with Kat, guiding her hands through the systems, keeping the silence and self doubt at bay by chattering on innocuously about something completely meaningless as the readouts continued to spit back useless information. It hurt him to think of her alone in that cavernous expanse, where everything echoed too loudly, including your own thoughts.

_But she's been there alone. You left her there._

The thought was like biting into ice, it made his skull crack with such pain. He'd left Kat alone in the Zord bay for months, abandoned her to same maddening exile from which she'd rescued him. He knew she hadn't stopped. He'd imprinted duty on her too deeply, tattooed it on the core of her. The audacity of it startled him now, the idea that he'd been so demanding as to force himself into her psyche in that way, long before he could bring himself to even stand at the door of her heart and beg.

He turned in his seat, half-intending to demand that the car be turned around this instant, that they go back because he'd left Kat for too long, and he shouldn't leave her again, should chain himself to her side, until she made the choice to walk away.

The grim set of Adam's jaw bitch-slapped him back into reality, reminding the half-crazy, unfocused Billy he'd become that there were others with people on the line and, if he didn't remember that, having left Kat would be the least of his transgressions. He almost offered up an apology for his thoughts, but the meaninglessness of it already tasted of ash. So instead he looked down at plastic bag in his hands, at the thin, flexible pieces of terror inside, and tried to reel all of himself in. Gathering up the fragments, he left each teammate to their struggle, all except Kat.

A sliver of his thoughts stayed with Kat because they couldn't not, but the rest he turned the mystery he held in his hands. Holding onto the plastic at the corners, he laid the bag out flat on his lap so that the two discs caught the sunlight, glinting back up at him like cold, electronic eyes.

Frowning, he rested a finger to the side of the blood stained one, the one he'd come to think of as dead. He moved the finger to the one meant for Jason. Clean and sparkling, it lay there like a taunt, not quite alive, but . . . _ready_, primed. Picking it up gingerly by its edges, he held it between thumb and forefinger.

There was something . . . familiar about the patterns, something that tugged at his memory.

"What?" Adam asked, obviously having followed Billy's movements though his gaze hadn't left the road.

Billy frowned, as the thought flitted away, dancing just out of reach of his attempt to put it into words. He shook his head. "Nothing. It's nothing."

But there had been something . . .

- + - + - + - + - + -

Kat let out a sigh that was equal parts frustration and relief as the final scan told her what she already knew. The Zords were fine.

They were really more than fine. They were dandy, peachy-keen, and any other number of ridiculous expressions she could hurl their way. As best she could tell, there had been no Trojan horses left, no sabotaged systems that would short out at just the right moment. They'd been left to hum along, as perfect as she'd been able to make them in Billy's absence. In short, the Zords were doing a damn sight better than anything else around here, including her.

_Now what?_

At that thought, she sank down in the pilot's chair and looked out at her friends, willing them to give her some other answer than the one she had. Because the appropriate response to that question was, 'Now you go try to repair everything else,' complete with all the double-meanings attached.

In truth she'd been a little bit grateful that Tommy had seen to fit to dictate his will like some discontent potentate because it absolved her, just a little, made it okay that she was hiding out here, shielding herself among these great sentinels, trusting that Billy's handiwork would protect her. But now her reprieve was over. Time to be a grownup.

If Billy were here, it would be different. She'd go to him, help him, knowing that it was the best possible place for her in every respect, and if they had to be up in the darkness of the Power-Chamber, where they seemed to lose their footing with every step, at least they'd still be there to shield the other.

She ran her hand along the controls, and it occurred to her that she could call him. From here, she could reach him, listen to his voice. But even as she rested her hand on the com-switch, she knew she wouldn't. Not from here, not from Edward. There was something too blasphemous about that, even for her.

Still it didn't stop her from wishing that she could, and he could lend her a little of his strength, not much, just enough to shore her up, jury-rig her into working order.

_Jury-rig . . ._

Kat shot bolt upright at a thought so deliciously crazy, it just might work in this fucked up, brave-new world.

- + - + - + - + - + -

Beltane smiled inwardly as she extended her hand out to the black knight sitting across from her. Already she fairly hummed in anticipation of the power that would run through her at his touch.

These human greeting rituals were very convenient . . .

Touching a stranger . . . really it was almost like peeling off your own armor for the enemy, it left one so very vulnerable. Dulcea would never have stood for that sort of thing on Phaedos. Touch skin to skin and any reasonably gifted warrior mage could have you on your knees licking their boots like they were _lasyal_ and _corid_ before you had time to blink.

_She_ couldn't of course, at least not then. Then she hadn't been reasonably gifted or really gifted in any particular way. _Empyat_, hollow, they'd called her, a vessel holding nothing. And so she left Phaedos, because her sister tried it once as a lesson about why Beltane above all people shouldn't touch, and Beltane found she didn't really care for either _lasyal _or_ corid._

And she _did not _intend to kneel, ever again.

But Dulcea's little lesson had taught her something . . . an empty vessel can be filled.

So she waited patiently, hand extended, a nice non-threatening middle-aged women sitting across from a well brought up young man. It almost took the fun out of things. Beltane thought of those lovely dark pits of self-loathing he called eyes. Well, _some_ of the fun.

As expected he lent forward and took her hand.

She was vaguely aware of him saying something, probably his name and other meaningless words of acquaintance. She'd ceased to listen the moment his flesh met hers. This had to be fast because without her tools, without the reinforcement of the circuits she'd so carefully constructed, she couldn't hold him for long. But it's okay. She'd cracked him open wide enough that this would be a cakewalk.

Extending two fingers out just a little further so they brushed the inside of his wrist, she met his gaze, held it, then locking her will around it, she let the glamour drop from her eyes. She made quick work of the few mental defenses he had left, slipping past the rubble so easily he probably never felt it. And then she was in, tunneling through the terribly uninteresting human parts to the core, to the wellspring that held what was beyond human, what he disgraced by ever having carried it. Plunging herself into the depths she braced for the shock.

Nothing.

It had to be here! He was the black! She had _seen _it. Not just in the costuming or symbols, but how he handled the group, turning them, shifting their course. He was power and change. Beltane moved deeper, faster, pushing herself further without care for any damage that might be done to herself or him.

It had to be here!

But it wasn't. There was nothing in him. Nothing but human parts, and the sparkle of his pitiful fairy dust magic. Annoyed, petulant, she melded her will into sieve, methodically separating out the flecks of gold from his life-stream. They almost weren't worth the trouble, but she was loathe to come back from a job empty handed. Collect enough and she could have them forged into something marketable.

"Jason? I got you a soda."

She'd let herself go so deeply she almost missed the voice. Quickly, she moved out of him, ignoring the wake she created with her speed. He'd mend, and if he didn't . . . she'd be gone before they figured that out.

Releasing him the moment she surfaced, Beltane gave his hand a sharp jerk, and when he tumbled forward, her little scream of alarm sounded almost as real as the girl's.

- + - + - + - + - + -

Slouching in his chair, Adam leaned his head back and stared up at the water stained ceiling, trying to ignore the sickening smell of the batch of LB media somebody had made up recently. They'd been lab-hopping for the past few hours, criss-crossing campus as Billy went from one piece of equipment to the next. So far he liked the engineering lab the best. All wire and electrodes and special-built clean rooms, it felt modern and cutting-edge, like it should hold the answers. But since it hadn't, they'd moved on, to physics and then a chem lab where Billy had done nothing more than pick up a few supplies.

There seemed to be no building to which Billy's student id wouldn't grant him access, and Adam had a sneaking suspicion Billy had hacked more than a few of the university's systems to make sure of that.

Now they sat in the Macater lab, in the biology building. This lab was dingy—all living organisms and machines kept past their prime. There had to be better places to do this, but Adam knew enough about how grant money worked to know that the more money a lab had the more likely it was some post-doctoral slave would still be around, trying to keep his or her head above water and out of the feeding frenzy.

Turning in his chair because one of those water stains had started to look a little too much like Scorpina in monster form, he looked over at the projection screen of the high-powered microscope they'd usurped. He had no idea what good a microscope was going to do them, but nothing else had worked.

"Anything?" Adam asked barely bothering to keep the lack of hope out of his voice.

When his question was met not with a sigh but silence, he sat up straighter.

"You've got something." It wasn't a question this time.

"Maybe." Leaning forward, Billy directed Adam's attention to one of the pathways that lined the circuitry. "What does that look like to you?"

Coming around to sit the chair, Billy vacated so that he could get a closer look, Adam peered at the area Billy had pointed out. At first he couldn't see what had Billy so interested, it looked just like any other run of circuitry, not particularly interesting unless you knew what programs it carried bound up in its electrical impulses. Bound up . . . there was something bound up in the circuits, something that shouldn't have been there . . . "No way . . ."

"Tell me what you're thinking, just so I know I'm not crazy."

"I'm thinking that pathway right there is hybrid. There's organics bound up in the circuitry, but that's . . ."

"Not impossible." Billy cut him off, as though he knew exactly where Adam's thoughts had been heading. "Hang on, I need to get into my computer."

They sat in nearly absolute silence as Billy ran through the dial up protocol, both so on edge, it was amazing they didn't jump at every tick of the second hand. After what seemed like an excruciatingly long time, the computers connected and he pulled up a series of files, one right after the other, dismissing each so quickly, Adam had nothing more than a vague impression of technical documents.

Then he stopped and stared at the screen, absolutely transfixed. Coming around behind him, Adam looked at what had so captured Billy's attention. "Holy shit."

There staring at them from the screen of the computer was a schematic for the exact same pathway they'd just been studying.

"You have no idea," Billy murmured as he zoomed out to show exactly what this was a schematic for.

The only response Adam was able to manage was a rather graceless _thunk_ as he collapsed in the seat next to him.

"Well? What do you think?" Billy prompted.

Oh, there was supposed to be thinking now, was there? That struck Adam as too damn funny, the idea that he'd be able to put words together at this moment. Still he found his mouth giving it a go, his tongue shaping the words with careful precision because they had to be carved fresh.

"I think we're out of our league."

The grim smile that flickered across Billy's face conveyed how completely they were in agreement on that point.

Adam swung back and forth in his chair looking from one screen to the other and then back, trying to work out why on earth the control pathway for their old morphers was now staring at them from the face of that thing. No answer was coming.

"Okay, here's what I don't get. They do different things. I mean we're pretty sure we know what that," he gestured to the projection screen, "little piece of nasty does, and we know what a morpher does . . . they're not remotely the same."

"They've got to be. We're just not seeing how," Billy murmured. The words were equal parts conviction and prayer.

Adam stood up and began to pace. He needed to talk this out, and until Billy told him to sit down and shut up he'd assume the other man needed to as well. "Okay, so we think you put this on a person and it somehow gives you control of them."

"That's about as far as I've gotten."

"But our morpher didn't control us, it gave us our power."

"Mm," Billy shook his head, "the _coins_ gave us the power. The morphers just let us access that power."

With his back turned he missed the rather expressive eye-roll Adam gave him, though he did stop short of sticking out his tongue. Maturity on three hours sleep, points for him. "Fine so the morpher let us access the power in the coins. Let's us . . ." As he found himself reaching for the next logical word, it was as though someone had taken a yellow highlighter to the whole thing. He turned to stare at Billy. "Let's us _control _the power in our coins."

"Sonofabitch," Billy breathed as he stood up and walked back over to the projection microscope, "they reversed the pathway. It's not a replica, it's a mirror!"

He traced his finger along the feed line. "I just automatically assumed this ran the same way. Subject to power. But if you reverse it," he moved his finger in the opposite direction. "If you run it power to subject, then it's the power that's in control and whoever holds the reigns to that power, holds the reigns to you." He frowned in puzzlement. "So where's the power source?

"Wait a minute. Are you telling me that I've been willing giving myself over to something that has the ability to turn me into a puppet?" Adam was aware that his voice had risen so that he was on the verge of yelling, but if he didn't sound pleased, well he wasn't. In fact after what had happened with Emily, he felt decidedly queasy.

Billy gave a little shrug that clearly said '_You knew there were risks_', and then obviously having thought better of leaving it at that, shook his head. "No one with access to the strings."

Well that made him feel marginally better . . . marginally.

But Billy kept going, spinning this thread of thought out to its logical conclusion. "Though in a way, I suppose that's what Rita did with Tommy, invested the green power coin with power she had access to, power she could still tap, control."

Adam suppressed a shudder . . . and they were back to queasy.

"Yeah, but . . . that was magic." He tried the words out as a dismissal, an effort to make himself feel better.

The look Billy turned on him made him feel a lot of things, better was not one of them. "We've been fighting the Machine Empire too long."

_Oh._

Billy cursed. "We've been going at this all wrong. I need to see the other one."

At that thought, they were a flurry of movement—Billy zooming out to see more of the . . . whatever it was, Adam didn't know what to call it any more; Adam grabbing for the blood-stained one that had been Emily's and carefully shaking it out beside the clean one that had been meant for Jason.

"What if there's nothing to see?"

"Then we're back at square one, but I'm not leaving until I know that. Look for anything, any kind of difference, a burnt out circuit, something added or removed, anything that will give us at least some kind of clue as to where the power source is."

"There's just so much blood." Adam whispered, as the grotesque mix of red and metal came into view, leering up at him like some fucked-up piece of modern art.

"I know. There's even some on this one." He pointed to the edge that had a thin rim of blood dulling the metal.

Adam frowned. "Was her hand cut?"

"I don't think-" Billy closed his eyes, and then snapped them open again, "No. No it wasn't. But her fingernails, she'd torn off two fingernails on that hand, index and middle finger."

Briefly, Adam wondered if he could call up every single injury at will, wondered what kind of full-color surround sound nightmares that memory of his made for.

"So maybe . . ." Adam looked down at his hands, contorting them in an effort to imagine blood from her fingers just skimming the edge of the metal, like a kiss. If she held her hand up it might run down her palms, catch in the lines . . . Bending her fingers in, running one pulpy stub of flesh against the rim, that would do it, and she probably wouldn't have even registered the new pain. Still it didn't feel right.

"It's bothering you, isn't it?"

"Yeah, it is, a little." He admitted, half-expecting Billy to tell him not to be silly. There really had been so much blood. It could have come from anywhere.

Except it was too specific, too precise, and apparently Billy thought the same thing, because he moved the view on the microscope to the same spot on Emily's disc. There, decorating the edge, almost invisible among the camouflage of Emily's blood, was an thread thin line of blood.

"Good instincts," Billy breathed. "Look at how the rest of the blood runs this way," he wiggled his fingers in downward strokes, like someone imitating rain, "but this . . . this runs in the opposite direction." He gestured in sharp diagonal strokes, stopping only when Adam grabbed his wrist.

"So what does it mean?"

"I think it means we might have just found our power source."

- + - + - + - + - + -

"You want to do what?!?" The words came out in strange, strangled laugh that Tommy hadn't meant at all, he'd meant to roar, meant to scare her back into her cage, just so she wouldn't have the audacity to think that she could do what she just did ever again. Because stalking onto the roof and coming to sit next to him, to look at him, and talk to him without even so much as a hesitation or flicker of guilt, like she had every right to still do that, was really beyond the pale, even for her. But her words were so ludicrous, that it came out as a laugh, and he found he was pleased to see her flinch just a little.

Still she didn't back down and strangely he found himself just as pleased by that because really he didn't want to turn into this monster, so maybe it was good he hadn't progressed to scary.

"I want to use the Zords to power the complex, or at least this part of the complex." She gestured down to the where the Power Chamber lay beneath.

"You know that's stupid, right?" He said the words before he had time to figure out how to phrase them correctly. He didn't want to fight with her, just wanted her gone, away, out of this night he'd claimed as his, but all he seemed to know how to do with Kat was love her or hurt her, and she'd already closed off one option.

"It's not," she responded, wearily.

"It is." He asserted, but the words had the same tired, chewed-over quality as hers. They were just going through the motions of this fight like they couldn't muster up the energy to really go at it, but they couldn't quite figure out how to communicate any other way. "I'm not going have us strip the only defenses we have left, just so we can have a little light."

"We need power."

"And I'm sure that Billy will provide it, eventually." His phrased the words intentionally. If Kat wanted to think of the ex-Ranger as perfect, then he could damn well shoulder all the responsibility that went with it.

"No. He won't."

_Losing faith so soon._ But he'd misread her again. He was always misreading her.

"He'll waste a lot of time trying to do it the way you want it, but he'll come to the same conclusion. We need power and we can't really fix anything to get power without power."

"Catch-22." He didn't look over at her exactly, but he found his eyes slanting in that direction, just in time to catch the ghost of a smile before she had a chance to tamp it down.

"Catch-22," she repeated.

And the little moment of understanding was such a painful reminder of all the things he wanted and couldn't have that it undid him, so before he could think it through, he'd turned and kissed her.

For second there was nothing but his lips against hers, the quick intake of surprised breath, her hands on his shoulders, and it was so sweet . . .

"Tommy! No!" Kat's hands scrabbled at his shoulders, pushing him away with such force that he had to throw his left hand behind him for balance. Touching a hand to her passion-bruised lips, she looked over at him in the horror he'd been trying for earlier.

He felt like the worst kind of heel.

"I'm sorry."

It took him a minute to realize that she'd said the words and not him. He didn't ask what she was sorry for, right now he needed to believe it was everything. Dropping his head to his hands, he just shook it back and forth, praying that she wouldn't be stupid enough to try to comfort him.

She didn't.

They sat there on the roof in silence, with no more than a foot of space between them, but it might as well have been the Gobi desert for all that it could be crossed now.

"So," he tried again, a vain attempt to reset, "you want to strip the Zords?"

"Not the Zords, just one Zord."

He shrugged, "What's the difference? Lose one and you might as well lose them all. You need all the Zords to make the Megazord."

"No you don't. You don't need Edward."

Thrown by her use of a name, he looked over at her in puzzlement.

"Your battlezord," she clarified, her mouth twisting in an ironic smile that told him she was aware of exactly how it sounded.

He pictured it for a second—Kat and Billy cannibalizing his Zord, ripping out entire sections to bend to their whims. The whole concept was a little metaphorical for his taste.

As though she'd read where his thoughts had headed, Kat began to tick off the talking points on her fingers. "It's too easily damaged, takes too long to repair, we can still make the Megazord without it, and I think if we jury-rig everything within an inch of its life we could get at least communications and enough power to start figuring out what the hell has gone wrong."

The laundry list of faults wasn't helping. He raised a hand to forestall any further persuading. "Let me think about it."

"Okay."

- + - + - + - + - + -

"Jason!" Tanya rushed forward as the Gold Ranger crumbled into the lap of the alarmed woman who sat across from him, but as she moved closer to him she found herself stopped by a great wall of vertigo. The entire room rocked and swayed, and she had to grab hold of a chair to keep her balance.

"Oh!" The woman yelped, and grabbed at Jason's shoulders just in time to prevent his head from connecting with the arm of her chair. Still struggling to hold onto to him, she turned and yelled, "Nurse?! Can we get a nurse?"

Before Tanya could do anything, a swarm of medical personnel had descended, extracting Jason from the woman's failing grip, and shifting him to a cart, whisking him away so fast, that Tanya was left with nothing to do, but stare.

She couldn't have moved anyway. Wave after wave of vertigo was crashing over her, spiraling her downward, forcing her under again and again until she couldn't breath.

"I don't know what happened." The woman was chattering on, apologizing for something that wasn't her fault. "He was sitting there. We were having this nice conversation . . ." She trailed off, "Oh sweetie, are you okay?"

Tanya shook her head, which only made things worse. "I t-think I need to sit down."

"I think that's a good idea." The woman's hands closed over her shoulders.

Suddenly Tanya was cold.

Shivering and nauseous and still fighting the vertigo that just wouldn't quit, she let the woman guide her to a chair. She couldn't think, couldn't do anything other hurt. Something had just happened, something important, but the pain was pressing at her memory, blocking it off. Gentle hands stroked her hair, and Tanya remembered the woman.

She lifted her head to say thank you, but the words died on her tongue.

"So you can see me." The woman looked at her with colorless eyes and raised the backs of her moonlight-pale fingers to her too-thin lips in a gesture that was almost contemplative, and Tanya saw a ripple pulse through the black veins that decorated the inside of her wrist. "Well, aren't you interesting?"

Beltane smiled against her fingers, enjoying the way the fear made the girl's posture go rigid. In truth, she really was almost as shocked as—What was her name again? Ah yes—as Tanya seemed to be.

Unable to help herself, she reached out brushed the hair out of Tanya's eyes, tucking it behind her ear. The girl flinched, but that was to be expected. "There. That's better."

The girl shot out of her chair. Oh really, this was immensely tiresome. Grabbing a bit of the yellow t-shirt, Beltane yanked her back into it. She wasn't going anywhere, not like that at least, not absorbing absolutely everything around her. Well, maybe absorbing wasn't the right word, but she was definitely _aware_.

Fascinated by this new development, she dropped her hand to girl's wrist, testing the waters casually. She was so open! It took no power to move through her. Like a raw, unbandanged wound, she'd take in everything strong enough to get to her, every poison, every toxin, even . . . Beltane cocked her head at that . . . yes, even future possibilities.

Even as she felt giddy at the discovery, she couldn't ignore the fact that once again the color was wrong. The yellow had no defenses to speak of. What was going on?

Reluctantly, she let go of the girl's wrist and sat back. Tanya spluttered and took great gulping breaths of air, as though she'd been the one plunged beneath the surface. Beltane watched impassively and tried to work through the riddle these two obviously presented.

She wasn't playing with all the information that much was clear, and it annoyed her. Everything so carefully planned out and the old man had pulled one over on her again. She needed to know more, needed the missing pieces.

This girl could get them for her, if she didn't have them already, wandering about like that, skimming off everyone's surface. And really the energy cost wouldn't so great, no walls to batter through, she wouldn't need to shackle her will in place with the control. After all it wasn't as though she'd be imposing herself on anyone, just taking up a little space, and the girl had already made so much room for the pieces she'd barely notice a few more. Beltane made a quick calculation. Yes, she could afford it, just barely.

It really was time she opened negotiations anyway.

- + - + - + - + - + -

Rocky came up so quickly after Kat left, that Tommy didn't doubt he'd followed her up to the Command Center. Briefly he wondered whether the impulse had been for Kat's good or his. Maybe it was both.

"I suppose you heard that." He murmured as Rocky pulled himself through the trapdoor, and sat on the ledge, his feet still resting on the ladder.

"Surprisingly, nope. Expected to, but really didn't."

"She wants to cannibalize my battlezord for parts and power." His voice gave the idea the dripping irony that was its due.

Rocky was silent at that, just sat there, contemplating. After what had stretched into an almost peaceful silence, he spoke, "It's not exactly a bad idea, you know."

Tommy laughed at that. "It's a brilliant idea is what it is."

"So you gonna let her do it?"

"I don't want to."

"Wasn't the question." There was an edge of warning to Rocky's voice. _Don't be stupid about this._

Tommy looked over at him and saw the Blue Ranger preparing himself for disappointment. They'd all looked like that at some point today, he realized, had all given him that _I don't have to like this_ look. He gritted his teeth.

"How did I become the villain of this piece?"

Rocky just shrugged.

"No, I'm serious! Billy waltzes back in here, like nothing's happened, swipes Kat out from under me, and I'm the one in the wrong? How did that happen?"

He meant the whole thing as some kind of rhetorical tirade, just a way to remind everyone of the facts, but to his surprise Rocky fixed him with a serious look, and asked, "You really want to know?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I really want to know."

"You're the leader, and you're not leading. You're acting out of anger, which is understandable, but not leading. Sucks, but . . ." he shrugged in resignation, "there it is."

Tommy was struck dumb.

Rocky sighed and turned to go, "There's probably something I should be doing. I'll just . . . go figure out what that is."

"Go help Kat."

Rocky's head snapped up.

"Taking apart that Zord is going to be a big job. She'll need all the help she can get."

- + - + - + - + - + -

Jason awoke slowly. First becoming conscious of his position—prone—and then his surroundings—hospital, he groaned.

"Oh good, you're awake." There was the snap of someone closing a book, and Tanya came into his view. Perching next to him on the bed, she smiled.

It was a cold smile, and he recoiled, forgetting he had no where to recoil to.

"That obvious, huh?" The not-Tanya asked, stretching her fingers out before her in examination. "I was really never very good at this part. Wearing someone else's skin . . ." she wriggled a bit, "can't quite get comfortable. Ah, well."

With that she reached down and ripped the IV out of his arm, quieting his scream with an open mouth kiss.

"Don't be such a baby. I didn't hurt you that badly, and this," she held up the IV needle, so that he could see it, "this certainly isn't going to help you recover."

She hopped off the bed. "Now, we really must get moving. Chop-chop." She clapped her hands together in a parody of a school-marm.

"I believe this is the part where you take me to your leader."

- + - + - + - + - + -

Comments and Criticism always appreciated. And in case you're wondering, no I'm not currently receiving professional help for the fact that I'm just this side of twisted.

Panache


End file.
